Christopher Plummer's Tympani Room

Moneyball

2011-10-11T13:14:00.006-05:00

He is quietly, painfully frustrated, and we can tell from the first shot. His team, the Oakland A's, has just lost to the Yankees. In an opening sequence of punctuated silence, using real footage from that game and followed up by real audio from various baseball radio pundits, we're taken to understand that his three best players have now been traded. There's little chance he'll be able to rebuild an already struggling team from that point on, much less take them to the next year's championship.

The championship is all that matters to Brad Pitt's Billy Beane, a real life draftee in his youth who, in a series of flashbacks, we discover didn't withstand the pressure during his time with the Mets. He's a present day Oakland GM now, and is increasingly obsessed with recovering those lost chances by driving his low-budget team to a championship.

If Moneyball is a baseball film in the same vein as your traditional sports team/underdog movie, it is a rare one for the sustained level of exceptional pessimism conveyed throughout. Jonah Hill's number-cruncher is recruited by Pitt. Hill introduces his mathematical analysis of player stats and picks an underdog roster to replace the traded team members. This does not go over well with the old, sun-browned, grizzly scouts in the room, who fight Pitt through the whole process ("he can't throw!" "he's too old!").

There are multiple battles between Pitt and his team coach, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who wants more than a one year contract and will "make the decisions that will be easiest to explain in interviews next year". Hoffman has studied the body language down to the last detail of sports coaches, the way they carry themselves, right down to the way they wear their watches. Beyond that this is kind of a thankless role, but certainly a contrast with his previous role for Bennett Miller in Capote.

If you've read Michael Lewis's book or have followed baseball at all, you probably know about the ensuing 20 game streak Oakland Athletics had once the pieces were finally put into place with Hill and Pitt's numerical team structuring. What's interesting about this story is how little that ultimately mattered to Billy Beane. Many might think this newer, colder way of building teams and putting them on the path to victory was exactly how Beane changed the game, for better or worse. Beane could've cared less, and turned down serious money to prove it.

Casually Idiotic Movie Parenting

2011-09-05T19:53:00.006-05:00

The first of this summer's entry into the annals of unfortunate parenting skills features a compelling twist via the Don't-Mess-With-Nature theme, in this summer's Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Most reviewers completely disregard this most surreal aspect of the film, choosing to focus on the rather beautifully executed motion-capture performance of Andy Serkis in the guise of the young chimpanzee, Caesar. Caesar moves through his early childhood on through the late stages of ape adolescence, developing a deep bond with James Franco's scientist. Due to his rapidly advancing intelligence, Caesar is even less suited to be paired with human companions than a normal chimpanzee would be by that point.

Once Caesar has been cast out for committing an act of violence (interpreted by the chimp as the defense of a loved one), he makes contact with other imprisoned apes, finds one that can also perform and understand sign language, and well, a few more steps from that and you've got yourself an ape tea party (would that both of these factions would head to the hills together).

That's the plot, as most people choose to see it, avoiding much conversation about the Splice-like father-child relationship here between Caesar and James Franco's character. You would think after working with chimpanzees this long Franco'd accept the obvious, that no matter how many injections of smarty serum you give 'em, they're still chimps, they're still going to reach a point where they're going to be well out of your control. If things had happened a little differently, we might've seen any of the truly unsettling scenarios such an odd relationship would produce. We'd have a much stranger film, for better or worse. Prequels are prequels, however, so the show must go on, humanity must eventually die, and eventually apes must rule (and fracture politically into a enough factions to include nuclear warhead worshippers).

The second film to debut in as many months focusing on the mistakes of embarrassingly stupid parents is the moderately compelling, Guillermo Del Toro scripted Don't Be Afraid of the Dark. Guy Pierce and Katie Holmes play a New England couple who bring Pierce's estranged (and largely ignored) 8 year old daughter to the old house Pierce is restoring for Architectural Design. Caught up with his young girlfriend and obsessed with getting a great cover for the magazine, Pierce doesn't notice in the slightest that dark forces exist within the bowels of the estate. Holmes, the less dumb of the two (perhaps because she's not actually the little girl's mother?) investigates the history of the William Blake inspired painter who lived in the house, and basically tracks down the history of the little tooth fairy monsters, almost too late.

Pierce determines that his girlfriend's various ripped up dresses are the fault of his daughter, brought about by jealousy. He doesn't really ask questions when the grounds keeper shows up stabbed by various tools and sharp objects, all over his body, more likely the result of a tiny monster attack than a fall down the cellar stairs. He refuses to believe that sinister creatures are plotting to steal his daughter and eat her teeth (a premise introduced to the audience in the most gruesome way possible, in the first few minutes of the film). Scene by scene we (from the honed Del Torian point of view of the little girl) grow convinced that Pierce is very stupid indeed. Holmes, who catches up with the viewers just in time, takes on a decent, heroic role in the film. Her character becomes more sympathetic than we'd expect.

Fright Night has Toni Collette playing an un-stupid parent, which in movie suburbia-land means she's playing an actual character. The new film, as well as the original, share enough of each other's plots that the characters all gradually discover that without a doubt, yes, the man next door is a vampire. Once Collette's house is ignited from the inside by Colin Farrel's sexy vampire ripping the gas-line from under the backyard and lighting it with a zippo, there's very little doubt of the danger he poses. This remake is fairly inventive, pretty funny throughout, brilliantly cast, and having just the right cocktail of suspense and cheeky creepiness, deserves its place next to the silly eighties classic. It also uses one real-estate sign very, very effectively.

People who enjoyed the original film probably had a cynical reaction to the announcement of the remake. They'd probably be surprised to hear that the movie we got is almost as good. The box-office punished this particular remake for being good, or perhaps just for being obscure enough to teenagers nowadays that it didn't register at all what it was, except for it being one more vampire flick. The less than $20 million box-office gross is possibly revenue from David Tenant fans. Serves Hollywood right for making something entertaining.

Summer '11

2011-07-31T19:06:00.028-05:00

The summer belongs to pop the way the fall belongs to (sometimes) loftier fare. The rules of bad and good still apply to summer movies, and there is no reason why blockbuster summers can't give us plausible great movie candidates. There's also no certainty that the Oscar season will always give us splendor or profundity. With that in mind, and with apologies for missing Bridesmades, Bad Teacher, Cars 2, Pirates 4.0 and Green Lantern:

X-Men: First Class

This clunker of a reboot, fun in spite of its obvious flaws, is actually a period piece (obligatory costume design nomination in sight?). Set in 1961, the flick gets in front of the incipient 1960s chic that's being brought on by Mad Men. To drive this home, it even has January Jones inhabiting the role of Emma Frost (perhaps too icily for general audiences, who, unfamiliar with her Betty Draper, have unfairly mocked her "dry" delivery). The plot materializes X-Men younglings in front of our very eyes much the way the Star Trek reboot did, only this new cast barely has time to really stand out from each other, save for maybe Nicholas Hoult's Hank McCoy/Beast. James McAvoy has little to do but debate Michael Fassbender's Magneto throughout the movie, puzzlingly urging Erik at one point to show mercy to the two warring armies he's lobbing missiles at, actually saying to this Holocaust survivor, "they are just following orders." The X-Men race against time to halt nuclear war during the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis, an interesting thing to include in a film aimed at teenagers, who may have vaguely heard of Kennedy and Castro at this point in their lives. If there's one great thing in the movie, it's Michael Fassbender, whose Magneto is sympathetic, fearsome, completely awesome, and as much hero as anti-hero.

Thor

The second Marvel movie in as many weeks, this summer, Thor is probably the goofiest of all big-budget superhero movies, but still falls short of the goofiness a Thor movie really deserves. This in spite of direction by Kenneth Branagh and production design by Bo Welch. That ought to give us something either brilliant or ghastly, but instead we get middling, Marvel micro-managed good behavior. Shame, really. A complete brat before expulsion from Asgard, a fish out-of-water who meets three useless humans midway through, and a perfectly boring day-saver by the end, Thor himself really hasn't got much to offer aside from his Rocky Horror-style sex-ness. The mid-section of this movie has been unfavorably compared to the Dolph Lundgren Masters of the Universe, as they share essentially the same plot. Asgard is beautifully designed, the rainbow bridge is worth every penny they spent on it, I enjoyed Loki, and Anthony Hopkins and Idris Elba's Asgardian turns, and hey look, it's Rene Russo! She's still in movies!

Super 8

Is it the destination or the journey? Is the MacGuffin really what we want to discover? There were two different movies going on with Super 8, one that was non-existent, throbbing in the heads of moviegoers expecting to have their minds blown (no doubt influenced by the marketing), and the other, the film we got, a loving tribute to Amblin Entertainment, produced by Amblin and J.J. Abrams, who himself was just the right age when E.T., Close Encounters and The Goonies came out in the late seventies and early eighties. For those who have positive associations with multiple bright blue lense-flares and children throttling through the suburbs on their bicycles, saving the day, this movie had plenty to keep your heart aflutter. To those expecting a mind-bender, you no doubt left disappointed. It's interesting that I haven't seen anyone state the obvious, that J.J. Abrams is doing for Spielberg here essentially the same thing that Todd Haynes did in honor of Douglas Sirk with Far From Heaven. Both films couldn't be more different in style or tone, but both pay loving tribute to very specific kinds of films, made by very specific kinds of directors.

(Note: This is the most child-endangeringest movie in many years)

Tranformers: Dark of the Moon

Did you spend nearly three hours oppressed under the mighty weight of yet another dull, incoherent, homophobic paean to what's dead inside us all? I did too, it sucked, but it sucked in that big American way that only Michael Bay's big clanging truck nutz can be sucked on. It's just a movie, critics, a movie borne of the equivalent of the GDPs of two or three developing nations, all so we could watch Optimus hide while humans suffer and die, Bumblebee could be traipsed in front of a firing squad only to triumph at the last minute, and all so Shia LaBeouf could be castrated in the most homophobic way possible by Ken Jeong. We became Rome long before the production of these movies. We'll likely have a few more like these before the fall.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2:

This one ties everything together about as well as you could expect, leaving out plenty, but following the best due course it could, which was to include all the bullet points so as to not incur the wrath of millions of die-hard Rowling fans. That being said, this movie is often rousing, closing out a series that was already on par with Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones for serving us high adventure and serving it well. There are times when this series has left out crucial structural character details, like Molly Weasley going to clean out the Boggart in Order of the Phoenix, only to have it turn into the rotating bodies of her beloved children, Harry as well. We get her payoff in this last flick, but it's more of a payoff if you've read the books. Still, one can forgive the filmmakers for leaving out much of the plot minutiae, rules of Harry and Voldemort's connection, etc. This series has more MacGuffins than any eight films could possibly include. What works in books makes for anti-narrative in films, sometimes. We'll never know if what was excluded would work if filmed, so to enjoy the movies is really to enjoy the full immersion of this beautiful world, and revel in the absolutely revelatory acting of its expansive British cast, of which much has been said, but of which Alan Rickman above all deserves Oscar attention later this year. His work is beautiful, as was Rowling's in creating his character, and while every character shines in the movies at one point or another, Rickman's Severus Snape (not forgetting Ralph Fiennes's amazing Voldemort), really dominates my memory of this wonderful film.

The Tree of Life

Terence Malick's Full-blown American Opera and Book of Job is a summer movie too. It's really far more ambitious than anything that's come out this summer, this year, or in many years. That's been the focus of much discussion of the movie, but for now, I'll focus on its astonishing, absorbing, painstakingly detailed account of a childhood. The scenes in Texas from the point of view of the young Sean Penn character (Brad Pitt playing his father), the slow, often quiet, sometimes jolting, sometime dangerous life of a pre-teen boy against a backdrop of a fifties small town, is really one of the best pieces of out-of-body-experience Americana I've ever seen. As he deals with a domineering, austere father, an outdoor life more compelling than television, a hair-raising trip into a stranger's house that was all the more plausible in the fifties than it ever would be in our time of locked doors, a receptive audience is taken on a journey in those scenes as well as the now famous dawn-of-time scenes, which rightly anoint the film as a peer with 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Captain America: The First Avenger

This whole summer has been a time machine, hasn't it? So much Americana, whether it's the 40s, 50s, 60s, or a J.J. Abrams remembered 1979, America seems to be turning back the clock in its fiction, pedalling as fast as it can away from our uncertain future. But Captain America is not sad, not depressing, even when comparing its old-fashioned heroic outlook to that of our current morass. It's fun, a little exciting, and full of rich performances by Toby Jones, Hugo Weaving, Tommy Lee Jones, Stanly Tucci and our dependable leads, perhaps not so rich, but still serviceable, Chris Evans and Hayley Atwell. It's directed with wit and good humor by Joe Johnston, will remind you more than once of his splendid The Rocketeer, and is the last stop on the road to next summer's The Avengers, which for all this lead-up and stretched-out origin-story excess from recent Marvel films, better be a rapturous outburst of owning.

I'm still on board for Cowboys & Aliens, will remain open-minded about that damned dirty ape movie, and am going nowhere near a smurf if I can help it. Stay tuned.

More Than Meets the Eye (No Homo)

2011-07-04T15:45:00.019-05:00

The movie critic tropes in service of hating Michael Bay films are as self-perpetuating as his movies. I have tried to approach each Transformers film with a ritual shedding of my film critic skin. After all, where else am I going to see a spectacle of this magnitude, in service of pure action picture id and technological worshipfulness? I really have, each time, tried to localize my thoughts and feelings into another part of my brain and see if my reptilian side can just tap into whatever collective unconscious instinct of ours has boosted the box office receipts for these films into the stratosphere. There I was this go-around, doing a smart-thoughts squelching mind-keigel, when what happened? The summer of 2011 fanboy-movie interjection into the events of the early 1960's pulled me right back out of my parietal lobe.

The movie begins in 1961, and traces its events with the run-up to the moon-landing, positing that we discovered signs of extra-terrestrial life on the moon and that the sole purpose of the mission was to discover what was there before the Russians did. Cut to the landing, and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin discover a wrecked Autobot spacecraft. This is all recreated with stock footage and digitally altered historical scenes. It's a ten or fifteen minute opener, requiring more patience from the audience than I ever expected Michael Bay to ask of us.

The mild goodwill that this engenders is spent rapidly as the film returns us to what has to be the worst collection of human characters in a sci-fi/fantasy picture I've ever encountered. The Witwicky family, spazzes all, Megan Fox's replacement model, who serves only to distract the heteros in the audience from their own impatience with the presence of dialogue, and John Turturro's purely awful ex-CIA agent, all are basically useless for the two hours or so we spend with them. The cartoon movie from 1986 didn't rely so heavily on its human characters. Its Autobots and Decepticons were themselves imbued with human characteristics of bravery, self-sacrifice, heroism, a sense of humor, sympathy, or outright ruthless evilness, and the human characters were relegated to the sidelines. I prefer that approach to imbuing no characters, human or machine, with any appealing or believable characteristics whatsoever.

Still my real complaint with these films has been less to do with the appalling tone or values on display, or the casual racism and homophobia (more on that in a moment), but more with the fact that I grew up with the Transformers, and here they just don't feel right. There's too many gears and crap flying around their bodies when they transform, too much detail on each of them, to the point where they often seem formless and indistinct, whether in close-up or longshot. Put them in a remotely cybertronian environment, especially in the case of Decepticons, and the effect is practically camouflage. I wish I could say the editing restraints of 3-D (perhaps the only restraint Michael Bay has encountered to his filmmaking in some fifteen years) make the transformers' scenes more comprehensible, but I don't really think they do.

This is the first film in this series to contain a dramatic plot of some kind, and it deals with Sam Witwicky's emergence into manhood and independence after terrible emasculation. At the start, he has the hottest girlfriend imaginable, but he can't find a job and is forced into a mailroom at some vaguely fascist corporation. It is at this job that an Asian scientist and conspiracy theorist corners him and all but homosexually rapes him in a bathroom stall to get him to admit to being in league with the autobots. I don't know how to adequately describe this scene. It's the most homophobic trash I've seen in a movie aimed at children in, perhaps my entire life. It's like Takeshi Miike done very poorly. After being gay-raped in a bathroom stall and his girlfriend dominated by Patrick Dempsey's evil Decepticon lieutenant character, he flails through the next hour or so until, after the apocalypse starts in Chicago, a marine (Josh Duhamel) hands him a gun. He is now a man. Arc achieved.

A central plot point involves an Autobot act of subterfuge that fools the Decepticons into thinking they've left Earth. They then take over Chicago and start murdering thousands of people, incinerating them like it's Spielberg's War of the Worlds. This is a film aimed at little kids, right? What are they (or we) to make of the Autobots allowing so many humans to lose their lives, just to convince us humans how much we need them? That's not the Optimus I grew up with. He then repeatedly says, arriving just a few moments after several innocent bystanders are annihilated, with regard to Decepticons, "We will kill them all". A far cry from the selfless heroism of "One shall stand, one shall fall".

The twice repeated mockery of Barack Obama, the flick's absolute militarism, its desperate attempt to tack on feelings of victory even after the Lincoln Memorial is destroyed and Chicago is left in ruins, is all just base pandering to a whole section of this country that can't accept that we've lost two wars and are in serious disrepair, as a nation. That we beat the Decepticons is really cold comfort, right?

The set-pieces are fearsome, large, and kind of amazing, particularly an extended sequence of a building falling over while our human protagonists are inside it (which goes on for nearly half an hour). The last hour and a half is so extensive indeed in its action sequences that we are ourselves cowed by its might, and perhaps many of us led to believe this is what an "awesome" movie looks like. In reality it's a cold, empty film, committed to distracting us from our own directionless present.

And with all that dudgeon I seemed to have felt and expressed, it's still just a movie, somehow marginally better than the second one. Someone asked me why John Malkovich and Frances McDormand would accept work in garbage like this (to say nothing of Alan Tudyk!). The reason should be obvious. Add up the total gross of the last five Coen Brothers or Spike Jonze films, and a Miss Pettigrew film, your total won't come close to one of these. I say bless them, all of them, may they each have been paid many riches.

Norse Gods and Monsters

2011-05-10T20:01:00.006-05:00

The Thor of comic-dom is the most risible character in the Marvel canon, the campiest of all their roster, second only in oafishness to the Hulk (who, of course, can’t help it). He’s given to aggressive histrionics, is silly to his core, and still somehow never draws too much attention to himself in Kenneth Branagh’s uneven, at times entertaining volume in the new Marvel Movie-verse.

Chris Hemsworth is perfectly adequate for Thor’s looks, but isn’t given much room to enunciate from a script that seems to want to cover only the basic ground of the story while never really having much fun. It’s mostly the clever, sometimes beautiful production design, and Kenneth Branagh’s light, barely noticeable direction that achieves the movie’s fairly blithe tone.

Branagh is man-for-hire here, and it’s easy to forget he’s involved in this at all. His films of Shakespeare’s plays have made him a good choice to handle the high mythology and lineal conflicts, but methinks total creative control of this franchise, handed to this director, would’ve been a high-camp experience to put the previous Wolverine entry to shame.

If Marvel has exerted its creative control, that hasn’t produced a movie that takes itself too seriously, either. The film is at its most entertaining in its God-out-of-Asgard scenes set in New Mexico, where Natalie Portman portrays a hunter for signals of extra-terrestrial life, assisted by her stock character/Juno wannabe, and Stellan Skarsgard (whom it was decreed had to be in a Thor movie with that name and lineage). The three main human characters frame the story of Thor’s banishment from Asgard when they discover his fallen body, only to have their backed up evidence taken from them by S.H.I.E.L.D. (Clark Gregg’s cameo here, to frame everything with the upcoming Avengers movie, is welcome and dependable)

The story also involves the ages old conflict between the gods of Asgard and the snow-giants of Jotunheim (or somesuch realm). Anthony Hopkins plays Odin more or less in his sleep, until of course he’s literally put to sleep later on. There’s a trusty team of Thor’s Power-Ranger-like sidekicks who eventually escape to Earth during Loki’s ascendance to the throne, and Idris Elba plays Heimdall (a name I had to look up), guard of the realm.

That’s right, Idris Elba. Squint and you’ll see him through the armor. The true nature of Loki (Tom HIddleston) is revealed soon after Thor’s banishment by Odin, which sets in motion a plot that you will barely remember upon leaving the theater, unless you’re one of a handful of truly committed Thor fans.

The images of Asgard, the mystical (and kind of mystifying) interplanetary transport device, stood guard with dignified authority by Elba’s Hiemdall, the surprising inclusion of Rene Russo, and the general high-adventure feeling of this undertaking, make it better than you might expect. The rainbow bridge, the golden towers, the glinting armor, the not-overlong battle scenes, are all visually very beautiful and engaging. Asgard might be an excitingly memorable place in the movies.

It is possible that Thor has never been made into a film before due to technology being insufficient until recent times to render the final product something not laughably unwatchable. The awesome success of Marvel movies and the impending Avengers film have made this entry altogether inevitable. Hard to say whether more camp would’ve made it even more memorable, but then maybe after the experience of Wolverine, toeing the line was a good choice. In the direction of camp, this installment doesn't even come close.

Brrrrreakbeat

2011-03-02T13:24:00.004-05:00

I have never seen this video's antecedent, but I'm guessing it sums that all up:

(Other goodies from the Stantons' new album are supplemental with this healthy dose of bass!)

Ffffact Vs Fiction

2011-01-28T14:42:00.008-05:00

Most people aren’t born a king or a queen. Woe to those who want not the burden. Consider, in Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech, poor George VI, unable even to complete a simple public reading due to his speech impediment. Were he not played with such reasonable humor and simple goodness by Colin Firth, American audiences would be turning their noses at him, as do most of this film’s detractors. Now is not a fashionable time for our thoughts to turn to royalty, certainly not a time to whitewash German appeasement.

Good thing then that our protagonist here is neither the humble Firth or certainly Timothy Spall’s glaring Winston Churchill, but Geoffrey Rush’s perspicacious speech therapist. Yes, we have here the story of a Duke who inherits the throne on account of Edward VIII’s moral turpitude, a story awash in both scandalous palace intrigue and sudden realignment of the throne to the public’s full support against the Nazis (never minding of course the actual turn of events in history outlined here, in what could not reasonably be called a review of the film in question).

That these events all lead to Neville Chamerlain’s and King George’s appeasement to the Nazis and the surrender of the Sudetenland is something we can all look up for ourselves (would Europe have fared better under Edward VIII?).

These may be questions for a film to ask, but they are not central to the action of this film. The King's Speech isn't celebrating the glories of the Monarchy, and indeed, the concept of divine right is nothing if not mocked by Rush’s speech therapist, and still more subtly skewered by Derek Jacobi’s portrayal of a pompous sycophant of an archbishop.

The joy of the film is in the deep friendship between George and Lionel, eventually transcending their different stations in life, and indeed, lasting the rest of their lives. Rush’s Lionel is the sharpest character here, the fool (who loves Shakespeare), who needles and disarms the King until the bond they share becomes the ultimate authority in the room. In order to unlock the key to Firth's stammer, he must first reduce him to vulnerabilities. The Australian insouciance with which he must dismantle royal airs is barely masked mischief for him.

If we are expected by some observers to view this film as an apology for appeasement and a bad reading of history, the actual experience proves that feeling difficult to achieve. It’s an electric thrill, terrifically exciting, more fun than the best action flick this year. The King’s Speech has reached the number two slot at the box office this week, and is this year's most successful indie besides Black Swan and the Coens’ True Grit. This is not because Americans are by and large sympathetic to the Monarchy.

Beats and Breaks of 2010

2010-12-24T13:59:00.006-05:00

2010 began in a "chillwave", or at least that's what the kids were calling it. Dubstep was either in ascendancy or decline, depending on who you talked to, and either way, high energy sounds (especially rock-centric ones) were on the way out. For the most part, the trend away from rock and roll continued (my hetero-lifemate and I defied the trend, perhaps giving it a good send-off down south with this mix), early in the year.

The electro-banger persisted, in spite of those of us on the other side of that Geiger-counter begging people to stop remaking Pon De Floor with a 4/4 (or morse-code).

What follows then is an off-year list, one in which narrative builds gave way to experimentation rather than the search for climactic moments. What did I look for in my sets? The same things I always do, stuff that's good on or off the floor, with or without pills, of the moment but not a slave to it, and quite possibly crossover music for the bleep-blop resistant.

Here goes, in no particular order:

Jamie Lidell - I Wanna Be Your Telephone (Tiga's Party like it's 19909 mix)

Smooth, instrumentally spare, loquacious and surprisingly epic, this is a down, slow and dirty groove good for catchin' 'em unawares. Only for adventurous DJs (DO NOT SPEED THIS UP! 118bpm is just right, don't ruin it):

Scissor Sisters - Invisible Light (Siriusmo mix)

From the Teutonic wonder-kid, this remix is harmonious with the original, able to stand on its own, and just absolutely smashes it, through and through:

BT - Le Nocturne de Lumiere

Go ahead, count the notes. Count the edits. Count the sheer number of sounds. I dare you. Or just take it in. This is what BT does. These Hopeful Machines is as much an attempt at mainstream success as BT has tried since Emotional Technology, and as such it is a beautiful, powerfully earnest, but genuinely emotional and frankly transcendent record of electronic music. The man writes music for healing that works as dance music. I don't care what style you're into, you simply must hear BT, whatever he's doing. This is the most "underground" cut on the record, deep into the second disc, but even at his most anthemic, he could make the most hardened dance-music cynic sit up. As well we all should:

Om Unit - Searching (Adam Freeland mix)

Adam Freeland has had an amazing year, and he's done it on the DL. After two years working on and touring from his Freeland album Cope, he's turned back to DJ sets, touring and trainspotting. His ears manage to find un-charted records that yearn to be heard, making him a DJ in the classical sense. Do yourself a favor, and go download his most recent set here. My goodness, new things you will hear. The set also includes this bangarang fucking remix of Om Unit from late summer:

TWR72 - Shock

The Walk & Rogerseventytwo are two Dutch guys with wild imaginations. To me, this record is breaks. Period. It's the boom-tap, baby, just wobbly, and then that build and release? Flawless. Listen here.

Ramadanman - Work Them

This kid is twelve or some shit. And he has this kind of rhythm structure in his brain. Whatever, he's the closest thing to dubstep I'm really embracing right now, though there are others. This guy won me over with this song, slowly and gradually, and then I began to discover his other work, which is really impressive for a young-un. He's the most accessible experimenter of 2010. Also, this track is definitely breaks, not dub, in case you wanna fight about it:

Coin Operated Boy - Trust Me (Clouds mix)
Heard this track in an Evil Nine set, really contrasted the disco-vibe of theirs, in a good way. Gnarly, that's what this is, and that's what Clouds is. Just sick as fuck:

Evil Nine - Auto

Speaking of their disco-vibe, they've really rocked it out with that. Their brand new label For Lovers and three sets of long-form DJ mixes have really changed their direction for them in the past year. Still, don't fret, they remain, as ever, Evil Nine. Here's a clip previewing their new three-track EP, Auto being the track one:

Sandro Silva & Anjiro Rijo - Fifty What (Dem Slackers mix)

Every DJ needs a good Hattori Hanzo sword, and here's one crafted by Dem Slackers, another ridiculously young producer, this time out of the Netherlands:

Cassius - I <3 U So

We're gonna finish it off with some elder statesmen, the classic duo you may remember from the time of Fatboy Slim and Basement Jaxx (as if now isn't also their time), here's some remarkable and gorgeous stuff from Cassius, producing perhaps the first instance of "Frenchstep" I'm aware of. Take it away, 2010:

Fair Game

2010-11-29T20:48:00.019-05:00

Neither agitprop nor Jason Bourne-esque spycraft lie at the heart of Doug Liman's Valerie Plame thriller Fair Game. Few attempts are made to elevate your heartrate on the way to a well-known conclusion, and no attempt is made to heavily propagandize the events that lead to that well-known conclusion. Instead, what we have is a strange, thoroughly implausible domestic drama, wherein a hot-headed husband's big mouth gets his wife fired, forcing him to hit the road to clear her name (not to mention provide for their family). Were it not for the events depicted centering so closely on the actual, real world outing of Plame, none of what transpires in the film would have the slightest verisimilitude.

That conflict between the pragmatic, good soldier Plame and the truth-seeking, jusice demanding Wilson is really the main-thread of the movie, which is doubtless an improvement over the Michael Moore speechifying or Oliver Stone psychodrama you might be expecting.

Naomi Watts's Plame and Sean Penn's Joe Wilson are each a workmanlike rendition of a type we've seen lately, the Mr and Mrs. Smith couple, a la Prizzi's Honor (and played out in five or six other films this year). The difference here is they're not superhuman or smug or overtly comical (or assassins). They're real people, extraordinary public servants or not. Things are most interesting here when we see Plame's matter-of-fact approach to concealing her identity, going on the job, interrogating people and collecting intelligence, and finally dealing with her exposure to the limelight.

Watts has a resume filled with serious, difficult roles, and a nack for playing them flawlessly. Penn's close-to-the-heart portrayal of Wilson as a boorish, passionate blow-hard, pursuing the truth at great peril to both of their livelihoods, is as you would imagine it. He's quite good, as usual, and plays the character without over-playing his own personal politics.

The film is not distractingly partisan, save for finding us the fattest Karl Rove in Hollywood. It depicts the Cheney underlings who cooked the books on WMD and then revealed Valerie Plame's identity to the world as thuggish, incompetent and treasonous, which of course, they were.

Transpose Pup

2010-11-08T15:14:00.001-05:00

Uberzone "Bunk Pitch" Promo Video from Uberzone on Vimeo.

Hunting Season

2010-10-31T13:03:00.007-05:00

Powerful yearning, for escape from one’s roots, the love of a good woman, and an abandonment of violence as a way of life are all boiling to the rim of Ben Affleck’s comeback in The Town. Here we have, as with the superior Gone Baby Gone, a return to the working-class Bostonian roots of Affleck’s breakout role, as co-star and co-author (with Matt Damon, and most certainly Kevin Smith, respectively) in Good Will Hunting. Affleck takes the starring role this time, and the box-office receipts have proven that to be a decent gambit. Here is a star well past his phony tabloid meltdown and a string of bad pictures, clearly having spent the last five years figuring out where to go from there. His two most recent films suggest he’s back in the game, and would very much like you to consider an end to the backlash against him.

It is, first of all, a good and absorbing film. It’s a heist-movie, co-starring an apparently fat(?) Jeremy Renner and a reliably one-step-behind FBI agent Jon Hamm. It is in many ways a standard one-last-job/shoot-out-with-the-cops flick (To call it a cat-and-mouse game would be to give the cat too much credit). It’s a film of lean, physical toughness and swagger. With any good heist or streets picture, you go for the window dressing, not the frame.

Jeremy Renner plays Affleck’s lifelong friend recently released from prison on a stint that kept Affleck from going there himself. Renner is the wild-card, like his character in The Hurt Locker, only with a self-preservation instinct that won’t outpace the death one. He’s predictable only in the sense that you can easily expect violence from him. At what point it will emerge is anyone’s guess.

The more crucial force in the picture is Jon Hamm’s FBI agent, who, though smart enough to know he has his guys, can’t quite keep up with Affleck. He throws around the word omerta in a strong-arming interrogation session, knows what it means, and knows the guys he’s tailing are bound by it (but doesn’t understand quickly enough how deeply another character becomes bound by it).

The film, while not as great as Gone Baby Gone, speaks to how deeply we may have ourselves underestimated Affleck. In salvaging his career, he has now made two of his best pictures. He’s currently filming his next project for Terrence Malick. People can surprise you from out of the holes they pull themselves.

The Soci(opath)al Network

2010-10-05T18:14:00.003-05:00

“That’s got to be the land-speed record for talking”

David Fincher’s Facebook "exposé” opens to a roller-coaster of words, no faster in terms of pacing and screw-ball velocity than ones spoken during the set-matches of the rest of the film, but they feel faster. Your ears sit up. The first exchange is between Mark Zuckerberg and his Boston University girlfriend, and it’s more densely packed than an episode of House (if not The West Wing). It reels you in, makes you adjust to the pitch and timbre of the film, and may well be the interaction you’ll need to review the most to get the entire movie. It’s all right there at the start.

Recorded from the perpetual-motion-machine of Aaron Sorkin’s brain, it doesn’t matter in the slightest whether or not what occurs from thereon is even remotely true. We’re witnessing history re-written from the heights. A few facts are certainly inescapable, being that Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook, settled out of court with two different parties (or many, many more), and went on to become Charles Foster Kane (in a hoodie).

For those who both snickered at the notion of a Facebook movie being made and at the prospect of Jesse Eisenberg starring in it, you are offered Eisenberg's scrutinizing, contemptuous face, for two whole hours. And, while he’s flaunting your small-mindedness with his pitch-perfect performance, he’d like to thank you now in advance for never again comparing him to Michael Cera. There are fine performances here, particularly from Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield (our incipient Spider Man). What’s more of a surprise is how surely Justin Timberlake takes over the movie halfway through. He fares more than well enough with the speaking of Sorkinese.

David Fincher’s film presents what most people would be convinced are mundane affairs, through his usual shadowy, sepia-lensed viewfinder. In this, he gets the tone of Zuckerberg’s resentment-filled coming-of-age just right. He also takes us deep into the world of the elite Harvard establishment and power-drunk tweener-preneurs. It’s a very interesting film for our resentful times.

It’s also a classic tale of an almost Nixonian triangulator. Spurned from his lack of social and practical acceptance in the highest echelons and clubs, not to mention his puny ineligibility for the rowing team, Zuckerberg is forced to outdo them all.

That starts a war. We see the testimony of the three major parties, the Winklevoss twins, Eduardo Saverin (Garfield) and Zuckerberg, the first two suing the latter for theft of intellectual property, and quite literal disenfranchisement, respectively. The official line of the filmmakers is that they’re presenting a “Rashomon” scenario for the viewers. They claim they don’t know which version of events is correct.

The movie seems to know, however. The entire film flashbacks from its deposition frame-story to a narrative in motion that leads inexorably down Zuckerberg’s byzantine maneuvering and cut-throat deal-making. The endgame is your typical lonely man in a tower, loveless, friendless, and rich.

We’ve seen that movie before, a few times. What we don’t usually see is a protagonist who might not realize what he’s lost; the price of being the world’s youngest billionaire. One is led to believe he didn’t even know he was so Machiavellian, but it’s all right there in the first scene.

It’s a break-up movie, set to Trent Reznor, filmed in Se7en-vision. And it’s the best film made from a Sorkin screenplay yet. Go see it.

HEART YOU, CASSIUS

2010-09-29T13:04:00.002-05:00

Holy shit, I'm not really blogging this year, eh?

Changes comin'.

Jahweh Wept

2010-09-10T23:29:00.005-05:00

The posts in question.

I Stayed Up and Watched This Movie on Showtime in 1988

2010-08-17T01:16:00.001-05:00

Head Scratchy Feet Thumpy

2010-07-31T20:03:00.000-05:00

No Words

2010-07-25T00:49:00.002-05:00

Questions had been asked as to whether Duisburg, a city of 500,000, was capable of holding such a large event, which suited Berlin, where crowds spilled across its wide avenues and into parks, preventing overcrowding.

What. The. Fuck.

A Canard

2010-07-22T11:09:00.005-05:00

I won't be writing any sort of stabilized review of Inception until I take my boo to see it next week, and am able to sort it more clearly a second time.

Briefly, I will say, however, something I've said before about different material in the past. The complaint has been surfacing (spoiler?) that the lucid dreaming of these characters is impossible, that is, dreams just don't work like that.

I will not speak to the real world implications of this. Either the conceit of this movie is impossible or it isn't. But.....ahem:

You can't hear explosions in space. You can't bend a spoon with your mind. There are no such thing as replicants. It's almost 2015 and we don't have hoverboards yet.

Nobody talks like an Aaron Sorkin or Quentin Tarantino character in real life.

You don't accept the premise of Inception? Then you weren't paying attention to how carefully they set up the notion that our protagonists have been at this for awhile, are the special ops of the dream-world.

And you're just looking to complain, aren't you?

Yay For Twitter and Us and Dance Music!

2010-07-20T12:39:00.003-05:00

OH NO NO NO

2010-07-15T12:00:00.014-05:00

- Overheard during the Guillermo Del Toro produced recent flick, Splice

Sad, really, that this movie, in this summer of flop-sweat on executive car-seats, had to go down with the rest. It's one of maybe three or so films with any ideas in it to come out since April.

And does it ever have ideas. So many, and so casually strewn in ornamental order, and in so short procession (the themes):

Man plays god, toys with nature

Man splices (titular!) genetic hybrid rabbit/fish/slug that harbors all kinds of disease curing possibilities

Man breaks rules (because man HADN'T broken rules yet!), combines own DNA with that of rabbit, bird, bat, fish (manticore?)

Man and woman have domestic woes. Raise subsequent she-beast together as though it were child

Man reads Frankenstein, realizes things will be JUST FINE

Step back for a second, replace the word man with Sarah Polley, and you've got the real story. Adrien Brody's character is playing rear-guard here. He has to be pleaded with for a good sixty minutes of the movie to be remotely on board with raising the central creature of this film, a female straight out of The Arrival with a stinger on her tail and a longing in her heart.

The film is compulsively watchable, interesting, and deeply creepy from start to finish. It has two or three very memorable scenes and a conclusion that will make or break your willingness to re-evaluate everything that has gone before.

The creature itself is the best reason to see the film. It's called Dren, and is named suddenly and decisively by Sarah Polley's character, who does everything here suddenly and decisively. Dren can proudly stand beside our greatest movie monsters. She's an ably designed, but most of all very well acted character indeed. It's worth remembering the words of Terry Gilliam:

My problem with E.T., and I think it would be a better film, are those big Walter Keane moonstone eyes, because you immediately love that little creature. There’s a moment in the film when they’re dissecting the frogs and they do a close-up of the frogs with those alien slit eyes. Now if E.T. had those eyes, then he’s a really grotesque ugly thing and the kid has to learn to love a grotesque ugly thing. It’s easy to love E.T. It should have been difficult to love E.T.

This movie keeps those moonstone eyes and makes it at times deeply troubling to find any sympathy for this creature, who is just NOT right at all. She shouldn't be. The story's inherent flaw, for me (though I sense the film is fumbling at a comment on our incredibly blasé times), is that our protagonists here take it as a given that they can essentially create life. There is nothing of the human awe we have in Croneberg's The Fly, in his protagonist's technological breakthrough. Stealing from the gods is so old hat.

True, Brody's character (wisely) fears their creation, knows it's just plain wrong, leaving Polley motivated by wounds I'll leave for you to discover. The whole thing is a domesticated affair. Everything is neatly tied into a homemaking, child-raising bow in this movie. It's interesting, but strikingly implausible. Genetic cut-chemists in love or no, if your significant other clones a human lady-bat-scorpion-frog-princess, it's actually perfectly reasonable to protest.

Splice is a series of bad decisions, played out on too everyman a stage. Stephen King is said to populate his stories with ordinary characters in an ordinary world, and confront them with extraordinary circumstances.

The couple in this movie is anything but ordinary, but they act like they're in a late-nineties sitcom together.

Still, it's fairly even-handed, in the sense that they both make about the same number of unfortunate choices. Brody's character takes the cake, by the end, making a profoundly terrible decision, and I must say, I haven't heard an audience talk back to a movie, in this way, in years.

CUUUUUTE

2010-07-14T00:44:00.002-05:00

I just can't stay mad at you guys

Huh

2010-07-03T01:15:00.006-05:00

I count myself lucky that none of my current favorite properties were casually offered up to this fucked-up burnout.

If you, after seeing The Happening and its box-office returns, still manage to throw a franchise away on the maker of that one, you should probably get fired.

My guess is that M Night Shyamalan is amassing every executive's secrets and is locking them away in his compound.

My favorite review of The Happening is here:

Equally odd is their insistence, even though they’ve known from the beginning that the deadly nerve agent is airborne, on spending as much time as possible outdoors. When fleeing by car, they leave the windows rolled down; anytime they want to look at a map or discuss what to do next they get out of the car to do so. It never seems to occur to any of the protagonists that they should get inside somewhere and tape the windows and doors --even though this is the only strategy we’ve seen work for anyone else. Eighty minutes into a 90-minute movie, Alma and Jess are still sitting in a small guest house with all the doors and windows open. When Elliot, who’s just watched someone fall victim to the toxin nearby screams, “Close the windows and the doors!” Alma innocently inquires “Why?”

From The Producer of Craven Money Grab!

2010-06-27T11:13:00.013-05:00

The trailer for Despicable Me, a lackluster looking Steve Carell vehicle which appears to have all the trappings of Cynical Sarcastic Kid-Movie Syndrome, contains the linchpin "From [Hollywood Mogul], the producer of Ice Age!"

Ponder that for a second. Never mind that the Ice Age series is second only to Shrek in low expectations for a kiddie flick, the little halflings don't know that or care. They see bright primary colors and hear orifices eructating, and if you're five, that's fine. Maybe you'll grow up one day to the personal discovery that the Pixar movies were so much better than that, in so many ways, and were, in fact, MOVIES, which trained your brains towards higher purposes. Some kids will happen upon that revelation, some won't.

The fact remains, unless you're Walt Goddamn Disney, nobody GIVES A FUCK WHAT YOUR NAME IS, OR THAT YOU PRODUCED ICE AGE, and certainly, NOBODY UNDER THE AGE OF TEN GIVES A FLYING FUCK AT A BADLY COMPUTER ANIMATED ROLLING DONUT, EITHER.

Isn't it enough that we watch a trailer and are either sold by it or not?

Yes, Pixar ads tout "From the Makers of Wall-E, Finding Nemo, etc.

That's because those movies inspire quiet awe and gentle concentration in young (and old) minds. And they speak for themselves, and Pete Doctor doesn't care if you remember his name or not, whatever your age.

Caliente

2010-06-17T23:32:00.001-05:00

in My Head For Days

2010-06-09T22:40:00.001-05:00

Chautauqua

2010-06-05T13:05:00.007-05:00

There've been a few DJ sets, preceding the one in yesterday's entry, that have so far this year kept alive the proper filthy naughty. Do they come from the places you'd predict I'd reconnoiter?

Would you have it any other way? After this set, lamentably missed by all of us not in Miami this past March? Scroll to minute 3:10 and tell me you didn't burn a hole in your britches. Liar:

Stanton Warriors - Miami Beach Party Session Live @ WMC 2010 by Stanton Warriors

The most impressive production duo currently alive and being monitored by the Men in Black is the Netherlands' The Walk and Rogerseventytwo. Here's why I'm right about that:

And here's access to their latest DJ mix, straight from the brand new label they call home.

Golden Bug has had a terrific year, out-producing almost everyone on the block, in quality and quantity (It's sad that the prolific producers tend to produce the most redundant stuff. That's not the case, here). If you haven't rocked the hell out of his Flamingo EP, you aren't a DJ this year.

Here's his Blah Blah Blah podcast set.

In which he introduced me to:

Now that you've had your cocoa puffs, pour some Balkan hot sauce on 'em:

Nico de Transilvania - Balktronic mix by Nico de Transilvania

Now push play on all these things at once.

Not Fighters

2010-06-03T11:48:00.006-05:00

:: FOR LOVERS :: MIXTAPE NO.1 by Evil Nine

More posting this month than there was the last. For now, rinse yourself deeply in the Evils' new direction. It is clearly them. It is clearly different. It makes perfect sense in their timeline. Real Love and Ultimo would've pissed off their fans ten years ago. Here and now, those tracks are built on a series of perfect, quite natural musical choices.

A high point in the set for me is the Mustapha 3000 remix of Headman, which came out in '06, but still sounds incredibly forward thinking.

Cheers!

ikeya seki - kano
i need love ( morgan geist's love dub ) - hot toddy
funkacise ( instrumental ) - the funkacise gang
gin nation - tiger & woods
serious - donna allen
mindless boogie 20 - tina - villa edit
moisture ( mustapha 3000 remix ) - headman
real love - evil nine
zoid - retro-grade
invisible light ( siriusmo remix ) - scissor sisters
spaceship ( kris menace dub ) - kelis
kilometer ( aeroplane remix ) - sebastian tellier
lemonade ( deadstock 33s remix ) - erol alkan & boys noize
love dead ( evil nine remix ) - army of the universe
sweetlight ( boris dlugosch remix ) - boys noize
ultimo - evil nine
no way back - adonis
pelu tolo ( bo'tox lip dub mix ) - mickey moonlight
no manners ( jay zinga 666 edit ) - evil nine
no manners ( dannoso instrumental remix ) - evil nine
the mind of many ( obi blanche remix ) - zombie nation & friends
ultimo ( dem slackers remix ) - evil nine
so light is her footfall ( breakbot remix ) - air

Why Libertarians Are Crazier Than Shithouse Rats, Volume XLIV

2010-05-23T10:49:00.002-05:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

YA HEARD!

2010-05-05T12:01:00.000-05:00

Bye, Wade

2010-05-02T20:58:00.001-05:00

If, as they say, a movie is a critique of another movie, the fast approaching summer has at least three or four hard-edged barrels of bloody insouciance, coming right up, to do the hard critical lifting for us. Between The Expendables, the A-Team, and the already released Kick-Ass (more vigilante superhero than mercenary, but bear with me) and The Losers, does a critic even need to do the job?

If only wishing made it so, especially if The Losers is any indication of what to expect in terms of self reflection. Oh, it's self-REFLEXIVE, all right, revealing the source of its central frustration. It's sad when a movie attempts ironic detachment but pulls off mostly slovenly detachment. Don't even get me started on the "slick" camera work and editing, and the terrible, washed out pallet of the whole endeavor. For all the money they've obviously spent here, the movie just isn't that much fun to look at.

What's really any fun at all about this thing is the two-thirds of the cast that seems to be not taking it too seriously. Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Zoe Saldana, Jason Patric, and particularly Chris Evans, all seem to know what kind of movie they're in. Evans's giddy sketch comedy and collection of t-shirt insta-commentary should be about the only thing you remember from The Losers two weeks later. Idris Elba, it should be noted, does not look happy in this at all.

The story can be summarized fairly succinctly. An elite team of special ops is framed, by a billionaire megalomaniac, for the killing of some thirty or so Bolivian children. Zoe Saldana shows up months later and gains Jeffrey Dean Morgan's trust by beating the shit out of him and burning down his hotel. It's kind of like the Comedian's death scene from Watchmen, only boring. Afterwords, they together convince the team to sneak back into the U.S. and find the billionaire, to exact, well, what exactly? Swift vengeance? Do they go to clear their names? Now, consider the scene here where a helicopter full of children is shot down. You'd probably think you're in for a serious revenge story, right?

Not the case. The tone of the movie kind of allows you to forget. It certainly doesn't presume you should care. Say what you will about Kick-Ass, whether you can sustain yourself through its sky-high level of violence or not, the stakes are always pretty emotionally clear. Deaths, kidnappings, beatings, atrocities, etc., are always felt and felt hard, in spite of the flick's cavalier tone.

The Losers seems to be approaching a similar revenge story, aspiring to the same level of hip, cool self reflexiveness. Kick-Ass succeeds wildly where The Losers seems not to try at all. I must stress this point: Thirty-plus children are brutally murdered onscreen in the first ten minutes of this flick, and by the end, they haven't really been mentioned again, and then the villain ESCAPES. Instead of retribution, we get some more goofball mugging from Chris Evans, which is entertaining, but more YouTube friendly than $10.50 a pop, right? It's sad to think they were setting this up for a sequel.

Opposite Day

2010-04-27T11:37:00.009-05:00

"Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protester — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans?"

Via Sullivan

At this point, the collective heaving sigh of millions of people, weary of the lunatic hatred, the fringey nuttiness and the charbroiled ideologies and the grandiose schemers, are just turning it all off. People who read blogs are people who read blogs (and newspapers). If you're one of the handful who reads mine, you'll still peer into this insanity from time to time.

But really, I feel a certain calm with this right now. Even if Palin or somesuch other wingnut wins in 2012, terrible though that would be, really, it's not ok, but something will rise out of its ashes. It may be the end of American politics if that happens, but its actual possibility (unlikely though that possibility may be), raises questions I will be asking anyone they pertain to come 2012:

- What does your party propose to do to solve our increasingly complex problems?

- What do you mean when you say you're "taking your country back"?

- How are things really going to be different or better for you under President Palin/Gingrich/Pawlenty?

- Do you really imagine that progressives, queers, lesbians, blacks, Hispanics, liberals, (actual) socialists, professors, scientists, doctors, writers, lawyers, the ACLU, Hollywood, anti-war activists, and on and on and on, will just pack it in and absolve themselves of the political process henceforth? Do you think the Civil Rights Act is going to wind itself back and rescind?

Especially if you galvanize us even harder with a politician as poisonous as her?

You really do live in The Outer Limits.

Citizenship

2010-04-17T18:37:00.000-05:00

The whole interview is well worth it.

Attn Wing Nuts

2010-04-09T18:27:00.005-05:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

The Big Bang Treaty

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor

Tea Party

I wish you all would watch this video. Watch it. Become less appalling. You know who you are, but of course, it's my blog, so you're not reading this.

These people are out-of-their-minds fucking wailing-at-the-moon crazy. Who WANTS to use nuclear weapons? Mostly it's people who'd call 'em "nucular", that's who. Stupid is always out for power. I wish their flocks would goddamn watch something like this, but of course, they won't.

F A T

2010-04-06T11:01:00.003-05:00

The final part of Red Letter Media's AOTC review. It works as a standalone bitch slap to George Lucas and is highly recommended:

Note: This clip contains the ultimate expression of devotion to The Empire Strikes Back

Bugbears

2010-04-05T13:00:00.015-05:00

Here we find two of the most common pundit afflictions: (1) a compulsion to assert equivalencies even when they don't exist, and (2) a willingness to spout anything without doing the slightest work to find out if it's true. Douthat's claim about Maddow -- that "conservatives are only invited on [her] show when they have something nasty to say about Republicans" -- is completely false.

- From Glenn Greenwald, who is always clear and direct.

Somehow, a very real and understandable discontentment with the the red-state blue-state divide has managed to produce a moral equivalence meme, regarding journalists, pundits, etc. My Sullivan addiction notwithstanding, his essentially moderate views notwithstanding, I don't think he's even a symbol of this, with his Moore, Hewitt, Malkin, etc. awards. He's still, essentially, a moderate (who calls himself a conservative).

I don't blame the President, either, based on his 2004 "we're not red states or blue states" speech.

I think it's a more amorphous, insidious muddying of clarity that's afoot. You cannot sufficiently tell me that the left's most potent rhetoric has anything on the far-right's spitting on people and making fun of or screaming at Parkinson's sufferers. We have one side that uses words like "socialism" where in private they're using the epithets they wish they could still use in the open.

This separates them from perfectly helpless, small-C conservatives who have legitimate concerns on spending, the deficit, taxes, etc. I've never felt these were inherently shallow things to focus on politically.

Rachel Maddow, someone whose videos I've obviously posted here a lot, is not an example of a dismissable journalist, damnable on the basis of her partisanship.

She is absolutely indispensable, largely due to her bias. She is honest on where she stands. She has a worldview, a variety of left-of-center political stances, and an absolutely fearless willingness to challenge people's orthodoxies, on both sides. She is learned, articulate, and always backs up what she's got with some kind of factual representation. We must stop condemning people simply for the courage of possessing a worldview.

The right in this country developed all on their own the myth of the "left-wing media".
They've used that meme to essentially elevate it into its own reality. It took them forty or so years.

So which side, now that there are two warring journalist sides, is correct? The right-wing side has managed to hold onto their own base while disillusioning other people into thinking that both sides are "equally wrong". They're masters of this.

So don't let them win. If we start swallowing this idea that both sides are equally wrong, both sides are damnably biased, we're invariably receiving our genesis of that idea from a long outdated right-wing talking point.

And worse, we're acting like children. It's the media's job to present us with the facts, not all sides of every issue. For "all sides" read "conservative ideology".

Be an adult. Weigh and consider the facts you are handed. And fuck "balance".

He's Your President Too

2010-04-04T23:20:00.003-05:00

I've knocked around Bill Maher a little bit in the past year, but I do still like the guy. He's right on this one, whether you like his atheism movie or not.

Get 'em, Roger

2010-04-04T10:14:00.000-05:00

Does it make me a liberal if I believe Jefferson has been more central to American history than Calvin? That Lincoln was our greatest president, and Davis not our President at all? That the Theory of Evolution towers with majesty above those who, in some cases, believe the earth may be 10,000 years old, and that men walked the earth with dinosaurs? No, it doesn't make me a liberal. It makes me an educated, rational being. Unfortunately, in some precincts of Texas that may appear to be nearly as bad.

(Via)

No Right Not To Be Shocked

2010-04-02T15:09:00.004-05:00

I wonder how often this book will brought up in protest at my store.

(The book in question.)

5 Dollars

2010-03-27T23:47:00.001-05:00

Roger Ebert, proud, lifelong 3-D hater.

via

RIP At the Movies

IN July

2010-03-27T11:15:00.001-05:00

Oh, these. These are great.

The version I grew up with:

(Via)

Earth + Plastic

2010-03-25T22:00:00.008-05:00

Some perspective. We don't have any voices like this one right now. This one struck down the din.

He wrote an excellent memoir, a great little history of our values, much like the work that preceded it.

Don't Wannnna Clooooose My Eyyyyes.....

2010-03-25T16:55:00.001-05:00

Always Amazed

2010-03-24T12:18:00.002-05:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

That gun-toting, John-Birching lunatics have no doubt in their minds that they'll actually win a bloody fight against the National Guard, the police, the U.S. Army, etc., is a constant source of amazement for me. There's just no doubt at all that they'll triumph over "tyranny". And replace it with what? Haha, why, freedom, silly.

Choose symbols instead of well-defined concepts, and violence will be read upon them.

We ignore these stories at our peril.

Our Daily Mwomp

2010-03-22T00:11:00.002-05:00

Popping in to share a wee little twitter moment between myself and the current frontrunner of breaksy-dom:

The chooooon under discussion:

Mr B - Little Acid People (Peo De Pitte Remix) by rogueindustries

Sorry, Comrade.

2010-03-21T00:11:00.002-05:00

Better luck elsewhere.

Chastity Porn:

2010-03-21T00:04:00.004-05:00

Made almost bearable by Rifftrax since its dvd inception:

79 Fucking Explosive

2010-03-18T16:12:00.002-05:00

(Via)

Oldie but a Goodie

2010-03-17T01:04:00.003-05:00

Let's give this here some American listens.

(and when the eff is Rogerseventytwo & The Walk's album coming out? Must needs futurism)

N@zis

2010-03-10T13:00:00.004-05:00

Per all the certainty 'round these parts that Avatar was going to win, well, I acknowledge both my brazen error, and my enthusiasm for The Hurt Locker victory. It's a great film. I can't say better about the whole thing than this.

My favorite film (which is never what actually wins) last year was Basterds, as you may have heard. The reason I bring it up again is that I heard nearly the dumbest thing I've ever heard, in my life, ever, and I've watched Paint Your Wagon.

Somebody, somewhere, actually complained that Inglourious Basterds, get this, was not a good film because it was not HISTORICALLY ACCURATE.

Marinate in that for a minute.

Blind as a Newborn Kitten

2010-03-10T10:22:00.005-05:00

(Via)

Bracing, yeah?

What I've never been able to understand, and have been forced to contemplate again after many years of leaving it alone, is why does it take so much effort for these people, these fundamentalists, to believe in the big G?

I mean, this country is still only the barest fraction non-believer. What's so threatening? We have the hugest, I mean hugest "Faithpoint" section I've ever seen in a BAM before. It's like we've got a whole Lifeway in there. How much supplemental shit do you people need? You've got all that, and you want to take over the whole rest of the print/electronic media? Why? Is this really a gotta-catch-'em-all scenario?

Makes me reaaaally hope I'm left behind. Would you really want to share an eternity with people who need this kind of blanket?

Better vote, and you better do it in droves, people, from now on. Serious shit's afoot.

Sprays Diet Coke on Screen

2010-03-06T16:21:00.001-05:00

A Trailer for Every Academy Award Winning Movie Ever -- powered by Cracked.com

A Majority IS the Will of the People

2010-03-03T13:52:00.001-05:00

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These assholes were voted out in droves. Keep on with your Obama temper-tantrum. It's gonna be a long one for you.

Accuracy, Cont.

2010-03-02T12:48:00.001-05:00

Army of One

2010-03-02T12:23:00.015-05:00

The Hurt Locker's chances of winning have not been damaged one bit by all the Army-Partisan knitpicking. The film will still lose to Avatar, just as scheduled.

Accuracy is a funny thing, sometimes we want it, sometimes we don't. Filmmakers have no responsibility whatsoever to provide you with accurate details. They should have no allegiance to any one group, or ideology, ideally. If you want specific, informative, accurate detail, get a textbook (unless you're in Texas). But don't go to the movies for it. That's pretty foolish.

Besides, define accuracy accurately. Try it. We know some facts to be inherently true. There are things we can verify. An IED defuser leaving the barracks for an entire night to wander deep into a dangerous area of town might never happen, but then again, it might. What, you're going to tell me it's impossible?

The type of uniform a soldier is wearing only matters to someone who used to be or is still a soldier. But filmmakers have no allegiance to you. Sorry. It would be nice if they had gotten that right, but did they maliciously get it wrong? That's quite doubtful.

Would a commanding officer allow an enemy combatant to bleed to death? You're going to tell me it's impossible? In this war?

The military is not an organization above scrutiny. And while you are respected and admired for your self-sacrifice, you do not get to dictate to filmmakers how their films are made. Complete fealty to your institution ignores the My Lais and Shock and Awes that occur under its purview.

I'm more than tired, really, of all this fealty to the military, anyway. I'm not anti-military at all, in principle, but not every soldier is a hero, and there are numerous documents, stories, films, photographs, memoirs, tv shows, and on and on to give anyone who is interested more than enough detail to absorb, accurately. And some of it is accurate information the Army and its enlisted men and women would rather we'd have never seen. Here're some facts for you. Go ahead and tell me what they mean.

Bigelow's film is not concerned with strict realism. It is being marketed as an action film, but it plays like an existential drama in the desert. If they've gotten some clothes or protocol wrong, they're only human, but, right or wrong, their priority is to tell the story they are telling, not the one you'd prefer.

These complaints are kind of the equivalent of the imdb Goofs section, writ large, because, understandably, the enlisted have very strong attachments to how units are run. I get that, but I would like to gently persuade anyone offended by it, that even if the The Hurt Locker were one hundred percent accurate, it would still not be making enough bank to qualify as a consciousness raiser for the people who made the hideous army recruitment ad, Transformers 2, the second biggest hit of 2009.

And you're going to tell me turning Bigelow's movie into Army propaganda and getting the suits right would get through to people? Not without giant Deceptinuts, Private. Hate to break it to you.

You may say Bigelow and co. are dishonoring the troops. Well, that is not their intention. But it is also, right or wrong, their right to "dishonor" the military if they find fault with how it or individuals within it are operating.

South Dakota, Everyone

2010-02-27T13:09:00.001-05:00

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Oscar Predix

2010-02-24T20:35:00.013-05:00

Avatar will win best picture, because no, Hurt Locker won't, neither will Sandra Bullock Helps the Black People, neither will Jews in Trouble, neither will Disney Kills Old People, etc. etc.

You remember the last time a movie earned the most money ever, was directed by James Cameron and won? Well, it's gonna happen again. And get over it, 'cause Avatar was a good movie, mmmkay?

Kathryn Bigelow will win her directing Oscar. She won the DGA, end of story. They're not going to give it to her ex, since they didn't give it to him for his 'Fuck You Money" movie 13 years ago.

I think the best actor category is really a face-off between Jeff Bridges and Jeremy Renner. Not entirely sure though, because I haven't seen Crazy Heart yet. The buzz around Bridges is huge, so it's probably a good bet. They're not going to give it to Morgan Freeman. C'mon, are they really serious about him getting this nom when the main character in Rugby Cures Racism was played by Matt Damon?

Christoph Waltz will win best supporting actor for his turn in Inglourious Basterds. This is a fact, like photosynthesis. Sorry, Sir-in-Canada Christopher Plummer. Better luck next time.

Sandra Bullock will not win best actress for ending racism with sports, especially if Matt Damon won't win in that role, ESPECIALLY if Morgan Freeman won't win for playing Nelson Mandella. Except Bullock will win. Because the Academy sent us a message a few years ago that films the likes of Crash are high-caliber social commentary. They are very, very stupid, after all. Sorry to all the other nominees, but this is Bullock's year. I'll be sure to rent The Net to celebrate.

Really don't know who's winning best supporting actress. Haven't seen most of them yet. Vera Farmiga is very good in Up In The Air. But the Crazy Heart buzz may give it to Gyllenhaal.

Animated category's hard this year. I loved so much of it, but I especially loved Up, and Pixar's a good bet in any year, especially since, in the new expanded (and perfectly uselessly expanded) category, Up won't beat Avatar. So Up it is. As much as I love Coraline and Fantastic Mr. Fox, they're more niche market films, and we know how the Academy feels about those!

Film editing, cinematography and screenwriting must all go to Inglourious Basterds.

And frankly, it was the best film of 2009, period, and I will brook no argument on this. It's an extraordinary, extraordinary film.

In the Loop should win adapted screenplay, but Up In The Air will win, which is ok, because it's awesome, and Jason Reitman deserves a screenplay award for writing this wonderful movie.

All that scribbling here, but really, this is Avatar's year, because in case you haven't noticed, Hollywood needs money too, right now, and Avatar will bring it in like Tolkien did seven years ago. Avatar will win every fx category there is, for all its animation and 3-d layering. So be it. It was a good movie.

Always Wanted This

2010-02-21T15:23:00.002-05:00

Q. I've read enough of your writing to gather that you admire, or did admire at one time, the film "Pink Floyd - The Wall." This is one of my all-time favorite films, and you are my all-time favorite film writer. I've read enough of your reviews and commentary to pick up on multiple references to this film, always positive, but have never read your actual full length review of the film. I assume there must be one. Maybe there isn't. I can't find it on IMDb.com or your own website.
Paul Apel

A. I did and do love it. I have no idea why I didn't review it at the time. It has been chosen for opening night of Ebertfest 2010, and between now and then I plan to write a Great Movie piece about it.

- Ebert's Answerman Column

It was, and remains, an extraordinary movie:

An Example...

2010-02-20T00:11:00.002-05:00

....of a producer whom I would not normally find myself in a position to play, but still find very, very interesting, and of course, very good. Tricky, unique production technique here:

Major Lazer - When You Hear the Bassline (Tony Senghore mix)

It's Dutch, Bitch

2010-02-16T12:44:00.001-05:00

Rogerseventytwo - Imagination

Oh Bother

2010-02-15T12:18:00.003-05:00

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Remember this, from last week? Well, it turns out strapping them down Alex-the-Droog isn't the worst advice, because apparently their entire careers are dependent on their collective amnesia and the amnesia of their followers. Christ on a melting cap.

Required Viewing

2010-02-11T17:08:00.006-05:00

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Every single one of these unbelievably addlepated nitwits who've been repeating this meme ought to be forced droog-in-a-chair to watch this clip and get goddamned real.

The stupidity of these people would just be funny if it weren't so predatory.

But It's Ok

2010-02-10T00:59:00.003-05:00

When Lynch Met Lucas from Sascha Ciezata on Vimeo.

(Via)

Idiocracy

2010-02-09T13:21:00.012-05:00

Every two months or so she comes back. People start acting like she has a chance. I don't know, maybe she does. I still doubt it.

My family is in lockstep with comparing Obama to Latin-American dictators. They believe everything they hear on the radio and on Fox News. They think Obama's going to raise the taxes on people's retirement funds (since they heard this on the radio, it's probably complete bullshit).

He may well have to, though. And if that happens, I'm not crying for anyone in my family who voted for two criminal presidents starting in 1968, and supported policies since then that have driven up the deficit and rammed our economy into oblivion. Not crying for any of you who did that. If you really believe in limited government, vote like it. You never, ever have, and in my most extreme moments, when I look at the likelihood of retiring with any sort of benefits myself, I gotta say, I don't care if they tax you into the stone-age. You break it, you bought it.

'Course, you could support a policy of raising the tax-rate for the wealthy back up to a pre-Reagan 70%. Deficit fixed, debt paid down, well before the middle-age of us millenials.

But we won't. And Obama won't. Because he's a radical socialist(?).

And they may have to raise your taxes, your never-ending Obama temper-tantrum notwithstanding.

Good luck with your Alaskan horrorshow.

Oh, For the Love of Beagles

2010-02-03T17:39:00.005-05:00

Today at the Daily Dish:

Stay Classy, Rush

The now Miss America judge said this to Gretchen Carlson:

I love women. I don’t know where all this got started. I love the women’s movement — especially when walking behind it.

Again: imagine Reagan saying something like that. You can't, can you?

Love your writing, Sully, even though your Reagan-crush blinds you, sometimes:

...But the reverse is true. Each year the need grows greater; the program grows greater. We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well that was probably true. They were all on a diet.

- Ronald Reagan - A Time For Choosing (Speech 1964)

University of &$#*&$

2010-02-02T10:06:00.004-05:00

I don't agree with a lot of this, but holy shit it's funny (and great film criticism).

(Hat Tip: Nastinchka)

Squeee

2010-02-01T13:23:00.001-05:00

Our President, Consitutional Scholar

2010-01-28T18:21:00.008-05:00

Article II, Section 3

"He shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient."

First, it's not only allowed that the president would give his views on the 3rd branch's ruling, it is a constitutional requirement, if he feels it needs consideration by Congress...

-Excellent letter to Glenn Greenwald, response to his excellent entry today.

More context here.

In Other, Happier Posts

2010-01-25T13:52:00.002-05:00

Grum is awesome. That is all

(via Too Many Sebastians)

With This One.....

2010-01-25T12:36:00.006-05:00

I don't want to get philosophical. I don't want to try and wade through finer points of the law.

It's simple: Abortion is legal, and shooting doctors point-blank in church is first degree murder.

Any other judicial consideration of that crime is enabling the murder of conscious, feeling human beings, who, along with their loved ones, are capable of suffering.

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These conservatives are lawless.

Fnarp

2010-01-21T22:12:00.001-05:00

(via IamFakeBlood)

Blech-quiem.

2010-01-20T12:27:00.006-05:00

From reader reactions at The Dish:

I was looking at the tally a few minutes ago, and it looks like Brown won by 100,000 votes. 100,000 people get to derail the possibility of health insurance for 40 million? In a state where they have already passed this same reform? How does that make any sense at all? The states represented by Democrats in the Senate have populations that vastly outnumber those represented by Republicans. They need to represent us.

Health-care reform is a bastardized gift to private insurers. I dunno, maybe this is for the best, somehow.

If they're gonna call y'all a bunch of pinko socialists and (GASP) liberals, might as well push for single payer and a repeal of DADT. Just sayin', cowards.

Addendum:

All that said, and as horrible as the Democrats have been all year, the most amazing -- and depressing -- aspect of all of this is how Americans have so quickly forgotten how thoroughly the Republicans, during their eight-year reign, destroyed the country. Whatever the source of our national woes are, re-empowering that faction cannot possibly be the answer to anything.

Subhuman Garbage

2010-01-14T22:25:00.005-05:00

You may have heard that Rush Limbaugh said some stupid, hateful shit about Haiti and how Obama blah blah blah. I never, ever listen to Limbaugh, so I, like most of you, I assume, only ever hear about the worst of the worse things that come out of his mouth. His most recent comments take the cake.

Many people on the left, like Olbermann, have said their piece (I have yet to hear anybody whatsoever on the right condemn Limbaugh).

None comes close in their rejoinders to Roger Ebert. It occurs to me, the two have at least one thing in common. They both have wide audiences. Limbaugh has millions of listeners a day, and Ebert has perhaps that many readers and fans. The differences start after that. One encourages, inspires, and nurtures a journey towards clearer, more mature discernment of nearly all things. The other takes direct advantage of the base ignorance of his following. One can be enjoyed by the illiterate. The other, well:

To: Rush Limbaugh
From: Roger Ebert

You should be horse-whipped for the insult you have paid to the highest office of our nation.

Having followed President Obama's suggestion and donated money to the Red Cross for relief in Haiti, I was offended to hear you suggest the President might be a thief capable of stealing money intended for the earthquake victims.

Here is a transcript from your program on Thursday:

Justin of Raleigh, North Carolina: "Why does Obama say if you want to donate some money, you could go to whitehouse.gov to direct you how to do so? If I wanted to donate to the Red Cross, why do I have to go to the White House page to donate?"

Limbaugh: "Exactly. Would you trust the money's gonna go to Haiti?"

Justin: "No."

Rush: "But would you trust that your name's gonna end up on a mailing list for the Obama people to start asking you for campaign donations for him and other causes?"

Justin: "Absolutely!"

Limbaugh: "Absolutely!"

That's what was said.

Unlike you and Justin of Raleigh, I went to Obama's web site, and discovered the link there leads directly to the Red Cross. I can think of a reason why anyone might want to go via the White House. That way they can be absolutely sure they're clicking on the Red Cross and not a fake site set up to exploit the tragedy.

But let me be sure I have this right. You and Justin agree that Obama might steal money intended for the Red Cross to help the wretched of Haiti.

This conversation came 48 hours after many of us had seen pitiful sights from Port au Prince. Tens of thousands are believed still alive beneath the rubble. You twisted their suffering into an opportunity to demean the character of the President of the United States.

This cannot have been an accident. A day earlier, a sound bite from your show went viral, in which you said Obama would exploit the situation to please his "black followers -- both the light-skinned and the dark-skinned ones."

Sen. Harry Reid made his careless comment thoughtlessly. Yours must have came after some thought. A one-liner in code to please your listeners who enjoy hearing African-Americans discussed in racist language. Yes, racist -- as anyone living in this country must realize.

You have a sizable listening audience. You apparently know how to please them. Anybody given a $400 million contract must know what he is doing.

That's what offends me. You know exactly what you're doing.

Just The Facts, Ma'am.

2010-01-13T20:03:00.001-05:00

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There are things worth griping about with this presidency. But lately, all I've been hearing is Republican talk, everywhere, and it attempts to obscure the facts.

What Decade Is It?

2010-01-12T01:46:00.003-05:00

Ali Love - Love Harder

This should be on the radio, on the teevee, everywhere.

Damn sexy.

(hopefully out before Valentine's Day Versus set)

Wider Margine of Defeat

2010-01-11T12:14:00.002-05:00

You probably don't even have to watch this. There's almost nothing new here. There's virtually nothing surprising in it, at all. We came perilously close, there. She could still, quite possibly, win the nomination. Don't doubt it. She's as proudly ignorant as her followers, if not more so. It sells.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

We've All Seen Avatar

2010-01-10T13:52:00.005-05:00

But we haven't all seen Avatar yet:

By giving us an alien species of natives who don’t fit into that conventional narrative, Mr. Cameron takes that out, forcing us to grapple with how we’d react if our society found itself lusting after the land or resources of a people even we believe to be more advanced than us in some ways — people whose communion with nature does enable them to survive better than we can in their environment rather than the opposite. This is a feat that can only be accomplished in a story about aliens, insofar as it is human nature for the victors in our armed conflicts to presume that their very civilization is objectively superior. Apparently it makes a lot of people very uncomfortable.

From Conor Friedersdorf's review and explicit defense.

Go see it again, then. Help it rightly beat Transformers.

(we are not shocked here at the Tympani Room to hear that David Denby, walking idiot, has completely missed the point)

9/11™ Happened

2010-01-08T14:41:00.002-05:00

While you were mayor.

WHILE BUSH WAS PRESIDENT

I will repeat, even if I am the only one reading this, ad infinitum, every time I hear this shit:

GEORGE W. BUSH, (R) TEXAS, WAS PRESIDENT WHEN WE WERE HIT.

Christ.

I'm not interested, really, in assessing total blame. I also don't believe Bush/Cheney orchestrated it to take advantage of the opportunity for war. I'm not a conspiracy nut. They were just incompetent. They were warned. They, and the system failed us. Under a REPUBLICAN REGIME.

GET SERIOUS, PEOPLE. GODDAMN.

And we were lucky this time, but unless Barack Obama personally received a warning entitled "Abdulmutallab determined to attack within the U.S.", as Bush did re: Bin Laden, y'all got no high ground on which to stand.

It's a moot point really. Can we all calm down a little? You can't be 100% safe, nor should you be. We can do better than this, but come on. Your chances of dying in a car-crash are still much higher. Get on with your lives.

Lullaby for Gaia

2010-01-04T23:26:00.011-05:00

In other words, there is no spiritualism to the Na'vi. Their beliefs would be fantastical on Earth, but on Pandora every single one of their convictions are borne out by physical facts. Even the Earthlings and their Earth tools are able to prove the scientific validity of Na'vi claims.

- Letter To Ebert

Avatar crossed the 1 Billion Dollar mark at the beginning of 2010.

More than half of those earnings come from overseas, and, ticket-inflation notwithstanding, I didn't expect this to be as big a hit as it is.

But it's passing a test in my head that few movies pass. I'm still thinking about it. For all the negative reaction to its seven-layers deep coat of MESSAGE, its easy comparison to Dances with Wolves and cheap new-agerism, I think any of us who felt that way might've been thinking too fast.

I'm not willing to act above this flick. It had me. Whatever choices Cameron and Co. made, it had me. Obviously it didn't play, nor was it developed, like any other movie.

I'm beginning to think it may have been one of the most positive films I've seen in quite some time. My urge is to see it again, to take in its peerless visuals more fully, and to approach it less full from what I usually expect my masterpieces to sound like. The script may or may not be great, but what were we wanting that script to do?

I need to see it again, like I said, to find out. My feeling here is that the visual accomplishment, impressive to be sure, is not the real key, in a world full of filmgoers who've seen everything, to its success.

Could it be we're entering an age of consciousness that demands social and ecological justice? Do we yearn to find some resolution to our murderous, destructive past through an embrace of one of the aspects of technology that can be good, to see other people's experiences as if they're our own?

Wish I Didn't Have to Politicize....

2010-01-02T11:01:00.007-05:00

...but, so far, the deadliest attack to take place on American soil occurred under a President who ran on a platform of strong national security and strong national defense, and was warned about it repeatedly, and was reading a story-book to children the moment we were hit.

Zero people die in a failed terrorist attack, and Obama's weak, can't keep us safe? You, all of you, need serious, serious propaganda cessation treatment. Stat.

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Watching the fake ad they made here makes me wonder, considering the above, if maybe Democrats could be forgiven a little, facts checked or not, for not wanting to seem like Republicans in sheeps' clothing. But the facts need to be stressed a little more than they are, one way or another.

Because, again, I ask the question, why are you all so silent on your own party's complete and abject failure to keep us safe in the first place? Would you all have been so forgiving and supportive to Al Gore? Don't make me laugh.

Best and Worst Films of the Decade

2009-12-31T18:43:00.009-05:00

Writing my list tonight, expanding on it (like I'm a writer or something) later:

Best of the '00s

10. The Wrestler

9. The Return of the King

8. Punch-Drunk Love

7. No Country For Old Men

6. Four Months, Three Weeks, and 2 Days

5. The Dark Knight

4. Children of Men

3. Kill Bill

2. Gosford Park

1. Once

Grandest Follies:

King Kong, Gangs of New York, Watchmen, Dogville/Manderlay, The Fountain

Most Underrated:

The Darjeeling Limited, The Life Aquatic, Hannibal, Hamlet 2, Where The Wild Things Are, Munich, Broken Flowers, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Monsters Inc, The Brothers Bloom, Blade 2, Once Upon a Time In Mexico, Death Proof

Most Overrated:

Monster, A Beautiful Mind, Gladiator, Pirates of the Caribbean 1,2, and 3, Chicago, any Ice Age or Shrek installment, 300

Best Film to Win Best Picture:

The Departed

Worst Film to Win Best Picture in the history of voting for shit:

Crash

Worst of the '00s

10. Highlander: Endgame

9. Driven

8. Fantastic Four

7. New Moon

6. Dungeons and Dragons

5. Terminator Salvation

4. The Mummy Returns

3. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

2. The Lady in the Water

1. Battlefield Earth

The Aughts

2009-12-31T15:19:00.002-05:00

If you're angry about race, but not particularly interested in understanding why, you probably like Crash. If you're black and believe in the curative qualities of yet another "dialogue around race," you probably liked Crash. If you're white and voted for Barack Obama strictly because he was black, you probably liked Crash. If you've ever used the term "post-racial" or "post-black" in a serious conversation, without a hint of irony, you probably liked Crash.

Happy New Year to you, Ta-Nehisi.

Can we throw out the bullshit this decade? Please? No? Bueller?

Attention Right-Tards

2009-12-30T12:45:00.001-05:00

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The lib'rulz have videos of you. At long last learn.

Disgrace

2009-12-25T15:53:00.015-05:00

No, not John Malkovich meets Coetzee. Can't wait for that one. Nope, here's the fetid list of odorous, festering bungs pried open and sprinkled with cocaine around the rim this year a la Naked Lunch (by way of explaining their puzzling success):

(God, what a year for crap)

Wolverine

It's worse than X3. Believe me. At no point does any of it follow any narrative logic. It is simply camp and only camp. As the year's best musical that contains no actual music, it's kind of great. As an X-Men movie, it's the greatest disappointment in comic-movie history. The economic kerplunk caused many films to scale back their budgets. Note the crappiest "Snnnck" in Wolverine history. Crappy writing costs nothing, that's for sure.

Terminator: Salvation

The worst film in the franchise, again, worse than the third installment in this series, which is saying something. If it accomplished only one good thing, it might have derailed McG's "film" career. Except no, it probably won't. Among this rotten film's many crimes (aside from the worst Christian Bale performance this side of a youtube remix) is the unforgivable crime of being relentlessly boring. It's poorly written, poorly directed, and poorly executed. There is zero tension in the film from start to finish. The governator's unfortunate cameo didn't really help things along, and the movie died a well-deserved death at the box-office, taking a real war of the machines franchise with it. Blecch.

My Bloody Valentine 3D

Three dimensional titty-harm. Unpleasant, in every conceivable way. I feel that seeing this in the theaters more than counts as having also seen Final Destination 3D. Gross.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Everything that's appalling about American movies is all here. It's like watching the cinematic equivalent of truck nuts, for nearly three fucking hours. It has a few cool scenes of transformerdom, but the rest of the movie is loud, shrill, incoherent, and, shockingly, casually racist. It is also, currently, the number one movie of the year, domestically, number nine overall, domestically, in American history, and 20th worldwide. Some people read the news to get depressed. It works just as well for me to read Box Office Mojo

New Moon

I actually put myself through this one un-riff-tracked. Why? No, seriously, dear jumping fuckin' Jesus God why? There is no dramatic action in this film whatsoever. Memo to teenage girls and cougar pedophiles everywhere: He loves me he loves me not, I love him I love him not is NOT A PLOT. It is not dramatic action. It is just you wasting your goddamned time waiting for a man who more than likely REALLY ISN'T FUCKING WORTH IT. GET SOME REALISTIC EXPECTATIONS ABOUT WHAT YOU SHOULD HAVE IN LIFE. Also, if you're not in Kentucky, your Taylor Lautner ball-gag ain't legal. Jesus.

The film is so sullen, so long, so unbearable, so poorly blocked, acted, and written, that by the time real actors show up towards the end, it's actually more confusing and distracting than before, because we have to adjust ourselves to A-list actors lending their talents to a completely unworthy script, concept, production design, and overall mission-statement. Michael Sheen is just bizarre, and Dakota Fanning might as well have her own Vampire Chronicles series. She's quite memorable. But what you have to sit through for her is so unbelievably bad it hurts. The film has an extended sequence of Bella staring out a window for three or four months, in emotional agony. By the end of the movie, I felt like I'd been right there with ya, sister.

Scene from Face Punch, the film within a film, and preferred choice of entertainment, here

In terms of popular success, bad ruled the year. I did not see GI Joe or Fast and Furious, but honestly, I'm ashamed of you, America. More so this time.

'09's Finest

2009-12-24T20:59:00.036-05:00

I didn't go to the movies enough this year. Little more behind than usual. Made a huge effort to see everything at Oscar season, and then wandered under the big tent poles for the rest of the year. Missed Precious, Up In The Air, etc., but I'll report on them if I see it's worth it. Until then, time to briefly summarize 2009. A good year:

District 9

This movie was a surprise from start to finish. It doesn't merely devolve into an action film at the end (a common reductive statement from Ebes and others, whenever there's gun-play at the end of a film). I have never seen a film that was this much a mix of Close Encounters and Cronenberg. It works very hard at being unpleasant, and succeeds. Apartheid references notwithstanding, it actually takes a bit of effort to root for these creatures, as they are truly unpleasant. That right there speaks to how deeply unusual, uncompromising and challenging this film really is. And it was a popular success, too. Really, that's marvelous.

Avatar

James Cameron's first film in twelve years is a lot of things. It is visually startling, ethical, fiery and passionate. It is also at times awkward and overbearing, and it is never, ever subtle. But you know what? On the one hand, it has a jaw dropping first hour, where the visual effects and stakes-setting are handled only the way Cameron can handle them. And then it allows itself to get caught up in its story without worrying about dazzling us every two seconds. It emerges as one of the most overtly anti-imperialist, anti-war, anti-invasion, pro-green movies to ever reach this wide an audience. And if some of it falls a little flat or some if it could've been more fluid, I'm willing to let those things go, because I saw sights I've never seen before, and was delighted and amazed many times. It's an audacious film. And perhaps, when there are still apparently people who don't believe we invaded Iraq for oil resources, indeed people who don't understand that sort of thing is the root cause of nearly all war, perhaps a bluntness, a lack of subtlety, is called for. Just a thought.

The Hurt Locker

It's as great as they say. Terrific lead role. Excellent, flawless direction. The most suspenseful film of the year. You need to see it.

Star Trek

Great film. Too loud for Patrick Stewart ("things are generally too loud, these days"). Too many lense flares. Or maybe not enough. Wonderful, funny, gripping. And that opening sequence has never ceased to give me goose bumps. It's touching, and, like the rest of the film, builds on a generous knowledge of Star Trek, and rewards you for it. It's a great movie that shows up already a friend to you. Here's hoping they build on this and make a Star Trek II worthy of Star Trek II.

Coraline

Classic. Creepy. Show it to kids. They deserve to get scared this good.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Wes Anderson's best film since The Royal Tenenbaums, it's essentially that kind of movie only there's a stop-motion animated cartoon playing atop the audio. Funny, inventive, dark, and is further proof of Anderson's versatility within his so-called limitations. Scorsese has made the same three films his entire career. Anderson may be on to his second kind of film, and this one maybe feels like a departure in some ways. Few filmmakers have made a world with this kind of texture, eccentricity and life (just wait for the scene in the cider-cellar. Absolutely beautiful artistry). And it's about the funniest film you'll see for a good long time.

Where The Wild Things Are

I love this film. Love it love it. It is a classic film, and it will be embraced, just you watch. It is the most experimental children's film released in the United States. Period. It is moody and surreal, dadaism for the youngins (except it will confuse their parents much more). It's richly funny and inventive, filled to the brim with sight-gags and unexpected twists. Its visual, directorial artistry is unprecedented. We have with us the first real Spike Jonze film. I hope he gets to make hundreds more. The rhythm of this film, the ending, the subtle, emotional pull of it, was bound to go over some people's heads. No doubt the mealy-mouthed, average, padded-safety net of a parent wouldn't be able to get it. And it's not too scary. Feh. Just take your little shitheads to see the flatulent 3D guinea pigs or whatever, then.

A Serious Man

Great, original Coen brothers flick. Indelible, merciless and riotously hilarious. Every scene is perfect. Since it played in three theaters nationally, be sure to rent it.

Up

Pixar's best since Finding Nemo. I love this more than anything they've done, Wall-E included. A lot of you won't be with me on that, but I can't think of a film with this kind of story, aimed at children, ever. It's a loving ode to reclaiming dreams, an adult and tragic tale of learning to accept what you can't change, and cherish the memory of what you've lost. It's also a rip-roaring adventure film with a hilarious, brilliantly revealed MacGuffin. And it's just one of the most dazzling visual experiences ever divined by Pixar, which is to say its title refers to where this film sits in the visual pantheon: very nearly above everything else. And if you are not sobbing your fucking eyes out at about the twenty minute mark, you really must have that wretched thumping coal deposit in your chest examined.

Inglourious Basterds

Here's a film that people argue about, but as far as I'm concerned, it should be easy for film lovers to figure out. To be disappointed that this isn't Quentin's Dirty Dozen is to be churlish and close-minded. Why do you want that, anyway? Why weren't you as enthralled as I was with a flick about a Jewish girl escaping an evil (brilliantly acted) "Jew-Hunter", only to craft the destruction of the twentieth century's greatest evil through a plan inspired by a seductive love of film?

The "heroes" of the film are not the Basterds, maybe because Tarantino senses how dubious it is to portray them as heroes in the first place. Instead, our heroes are Soshanna and her black lover, Pabst and the fires of God's wrathful justice (which, Soshanna, in a cloud of smoke and fury, gets to personify in one powerful visual masterstroke, solidifying this as a goddamned masterpiece, at the end)

I've almost left out the badass English film critic and theorist who doubles as a spy in Act II. And the awe-inspiring bar-scene with the King Kong speech. I can't wait to watch this one twenty more times. Be thankful for Quentin, people. God.

*********************

Honorable mention goes to Funny People, which deserved more attention, it really was quite good. Also to Knowing, a film which had it starred Rufus Sewell instead of you-know-who, might have been given a fairer shake by all of you.

Grand Folly award must also go to Zach Snyder's adaptation of Watchmen, a work of lovingly crafted, powerful obtuseness. It at times feels as though Dr. Manhattan has directed the film, but I still can't think of any big-budget movie more curious about determinism and physics than this one. It's a mind-expanding, consciousness-raising film, perhaps because it hewed as close as it did to Moore's original master-plan. It is flawed. It doesn't quite get Ozymandias right, though I don't believe that's entirely down on Matthew Goode. Malin Akerman is bad, but I'm not sure how her character could be all that good. And the Nite-Owl love making could well be excised from the graphic novel, not just the movie.

Still, Rorschach's, and Dr. Manhattan's parts (heheheh) of this story are simply awe-inspring. Really heady stuff, just unlike anything else I've seen in recent films. Gods and monsters, battling it out, that's what you get here. I think we really should be more open to how individual films are paced and orchestrated. This was an exceptional, albeit flawed film, and I believe its greatness outweighs its weaknesses. Some of it is truly breathtaking. How often does that even happen for a minute?

Rejoice!

2009-12-23T20:18:00.001-05:00

I survived retail at Christmastime, and am Ridge-certed back into sanity, but still the experience left me thinking of this, and only this:

Yes. We all laughed.

And yes, you should totally watch this, start to finish. Best doc of the year:

Tomorrow, Avatar review and year best and year worst. Soon, best and worst of the whole damned '00s.

Better Than Cribs

2009-12-23T11:35:00.005-05:00

You're a nerd. You spend your time with computers, like me.

New Car Caviar Four Star Daydream

2009-12-22T12:43:00.008-05:00

"Someoen just go ahaed and mark this as the death of music. why don't you get together and desecrate the mona lisa or re-shoot the godfather?"

- Angry fanboy on iTunes complaining about The Flaming Lips, Stardeath, Henry Rollins, et. al, covering the entirety of Dark Side Of the Moon.

Music is meant to be performed and experimented with. And The Flaming Lips are easily as accomplished today as Pink Floyd was in their day.

The original version will always be there.

Try doing something even remotely as positive as the Lips have been doing with their lives. I dare you.

Just A Reminder

2009-12-17T20:35:00.002-05:00

These people are scum, sent to manipulate the stupid, and there is literally nothing they will not say, nothing they will not steal, and nothing they will not abuse.

And when Jon Stewart gets this scoldy, you know you've accomplished something.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Highway to Health - Last Tea Party Protest of the Year

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Crisis

We're Smart Before We're Stupid

2009-12-10T14:11:00.004-05:00

From Roger Ebert's Answer Man Column, this week:

Q. My 8-year-old son Andrew has taken an interest in my movie collection. We've been watching movies atypical for someone that young: "Rushmore," "Spellbound" (the spelling bee documentary), "The Right Stuff," "Tell No One" (with subtitles no less!) and this past Friday, a movie near and dear to you: "Dark City."

It appears that kids can handle complex characters and story lines better than we think. Very rarely do I have to explain what was going on, and his comments indicate that he is getting it (during "Rushmore": "Sometimes Max is not nice, but I like him"; on the ending of "Dark City," "He knows all about her, but she doesn't know about him!")

What strikes me the most is how "natural" cinematic grammar is understood by children. No one has to sit down and explain things like cutaways, flashbacks, dream sequences, POV shots and the passage of time in films. How do they learn this stuff? Also, do you think the thematic material in the movies I listed is too much for 8-year-olds, or can I continue to brag and bore my friends?

Mike Spearns, St. Johns, Newfoundland

A. Start bragging. IMHO, kids up until about the age of 11 are more open to good movies than they will be again for some years, unless they fall prey to the deadening effect of peer pressure. A kid knows, as any adult does, that "Twilight" is a crashing bore. I suspect many teenagers like it because they have been ordered to by their peers.

Younger children instinctively love a Miyazaki animated film more than the meaningless action of films like "Monsters vs. Aliens" or "Kung Fu Panda." They're open to the magic. Later, some seem to need to be battered by noise and chaos.

I've never met a preschooler who did not respond well to silent comedy. A film critic friend of mine and his novelist wife raised their daughter on nothing but good films, and so she developed such good taste that she never has been able to stomach visual junk food.

As for understanding the language, the grammar of film seems to have evolved directly from the instincts of the first filmmakers. It requires no theory to understand the difference between a closeup and a long shot, or that a dream sequence is a dream sequence. A good movie contains all the instructions you need about how to watch it. This is true of the greatest films. Only junk like "Transformers 2" requires an instruction manual.

(Reprinted here in full only because his site won't archive it in a way that leads you back to it easily)

Essential Viewing

2009-12-10T11:04:00.002-05:00

Though fair warning, it is sickening to listen to:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Get Her, Sully

2009-12-08T14:32:00.003-05:00

(Update: Ok, the end of this is pretty funny)

It's Always So Funny...

2009-12-06T22:36:00.005-05:00

...when an emotionally, morally, and intellectually challenged subsection of an electoral minority gets together and protests.

Unconstitutional? What section? Which article? What amendment? Define the Constitution for me. I dare you.

Where was their anger while we were being wiretapped? Where was the anger during the largest transfer of wealth from one class of people to another, in history? Where was their anger, etc., etc., etc.?

If a hundred assholes crash a hundred planes into a hundred buildings, tomorrow, I still want us to set the example for the world with a commitment to due process.

All True

2009-11-30T13:09:00.001-05:00

Missed this last week, but I hear about this book day in and day out at work, and this is absolutely accurate:

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

The Word - Grand Old Pity Party

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

U.S. Speedskating

Too Fun Not To Post

2009-11-27T14:26:00.000-05:00

Strip Steve - 'Breakin' from Boysnoize Records on Vimeo.

I'm Thankful

2009-11-26T17:11:00.003-05:00

For Three Wolf Moon

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

(via Earthtopus)

Your Year In Futurism

2009-11-25T22:17:00.010-05:00

December is upon us, all the big releases are already pending, and it's not too early to lay out my top ten tracks of the year. 2009 was a fuckin' year for stormers. 2010's gonna have to mobilize early to beat this one:

10. Tiga - What You Need (Proxy mix)

This is the new hard. Proxy's champion dark sounds rival the best of Uberzone, Crystal Method and even Prodigy (just check his remixes of Liam's stuff. Scorchers). This track wound up mixing with a variety of styles this year.

9. Kidda - Doo Whot (Jaymo & Andy George's Moda mix)

Brings back big beat for a moment or two, only to abandon it completely for the worbliest of basslines I've heard all year. Jaymo & Andy George are gonna break it big in 2010.

8. Evil Nine - The Night

Such an amazing track. An epic, enthralling number. Evil Nine has triumphed with the most orchestral and pleasing track you can dance to since, well, Hybrid.

7. South Rakkas Crew - Robot's Revenge

Yeah. I wanted this one to come out a while ago. Hopefully it'll come out before New Year's. Good Christ, this is sick.

6. Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs - Sickly Child

They have this name, and are mindblowingly awesome. It's worth pointing out that I discovered some of these tracks listening to Alex Metric's monthly radio show, and I think he's absolutely right, here. Just disgusting.

5. Popof - Faces'uch

Best elektro of the year. Just flawless, as is everything this dude divines.

4. Stanton Warriors - Good Vibrations

I'd hate to spoil this for you. Just let 'em show you how it's done.

3. Miike Snow - Black and blue (Tiga mix)

Down and dirty, spastic, spare and funky as fuck. Took me a few listens to adequately appreciate. He's doing a lot more here than you may first realize. Just the sexiest remix this year.

2. Passion Pit - Eyes as Candles (Grum vocal mix)

Another gem introduced to me by Alex Metric, Grum's jaw-dropping remix of Passion Pit was the theme song to my travels with Holly through the southwest this year. Incidentally, this is a bootleg, probably not for sale ever, and it's mislabeled on the internet as "To Kingdom Come".

1. Alex Metric - What Now

Good luck topping this in the rock meats electronic category. God. What a fucking storm trooper of a song. Hat's off, and good luck to Mr. Metric in his quest to top this himself.

And Happy Thanksgiving to all you lovers of the wobbly sound.

Citation

2009-11-24T02:23:00.001-05:00

And if you don't read and read deeply and if you don't
possess whether you memorize it or not, you don't powerfully and
deeply possess very strong works of literature and thought indeed,
then you will impoverish your thinking. And if we impoverish our
thinking, if it becomes any more adulterated than it has already in
the last third of the century, then I would fear for what is, after
all, most precious about this country...

...But I would fear for the political future of democracy in this large
and varied country if we really do stop reading deeply and holding on
to what we read, if we stop reading the best that has been written,
because then I think we will not think as clearly or as well and we
will be subject to demagoguery.

- Harold Bloom, circa 2000

"Line"

2009-11-19T12:23:00.013-05:00

I've been standing askance of Twilight since I discovered what it even was in the first place. I was content for awhile not to have any dog (or wolf) in that fight, while being basically sympathetic to the common-sense feminist complaints against Meyer's Teenage Chastity Porn with a Mormon Agenda™.

Its underlying themes of sex without touching, of abject attachment, of co-dependence, of deep, black snake moan need at all times for a superhuman man to protect you, the obsession with Edward, the constant description of....

...well, I've read detailed take-downs from people who've read the book so I didn't have to, and this is a damned good one: (part 1) (part 2)

For a surprise, read through this interview and you'll discover that Kristen Stewart is thoughtful enough to see what's wrong with Edward and Bella's relationship:

You have to question their (Bella and Edward's) motivations - to watch two people so unhealthily devoted to each other.

'The weirdest f**king themes run through this story - like dominance and masochism.'

This thoughtfulness doesn't preclude her staying on for the set-for-life status, and frankly, who could blame her?

So, other people, I should say mostly women, have fought this fight, and I've stayed out of it. Until now. Because this shit just gets creepier and creepier, and I can't ignore it anymore. I would say that most of the women I sell the books to at my bookstore are thirty-five or older. And this used to be all about Edward, but it's not now.

Like I just said, I work at a bookstore. I work at a corporate bookstore. I had never heard of Jon and Kate and the cabbages until I started working in a spot near the tabloids. I see all the trash. Less than five feet from where I work we have the Taylor Lautner bookmarks. We can barely keep them in the store.

Ladies, here's Lautner's IMDB page.

Look closely. Need help? Allow me:

11 February 1992

Guess what that means!

It's not about Edward anymore. It's all about Jacob.

And you are all pedophiles.

But your condition gave me the opportunity to laugh at this, so thanks!

Maddow's Stunned Silence

2009-11-18T11:46:00.003-05:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Well. You may say, "why not just ignore this, it's just like watching a train-wreck and there's nothing you can do about it, anyway".

And I say to you, this is really happening right now. And believe me, a great number of people take this rhetoric seriously. Many others on their side do not. But you should be apprised.

(and with people like this in the spotlight, egging their kind on, we really need to be vigilant)

Lock-Step

2009-11-17T14:11:00.006-05:00

People buying Palin voucher last night:

Customer 1: She's the only one who made any damned sense during that whole election. Not like that jack-ass who's in there now

Customer 2: AMEN

Customer 1: They act like being able to skin a moose and fire-

Customer 2: -fire a gun

Customer 1: -a gun, yes, that disqualifies her from being president!

(she wasn't running for president. You know that, right? I mean, yes, obviously she could've been president, in her position, god help us all, but, remember John McCain? War Hero? Accomplished Senator? No?)

Customer 1: If I keep hearing that the economy's improving I'm gonna puke.

So, is this a majority of southerners and other hard-line conservatives? This is what Karl Rove has programmed them to be? People who hear not policy, or words, just code? She makes sense? In what hypothetical linguistic way?

I know, I know, I shouldn't be surprised. Still, cheering for high unemployment and rooting for economic catastrophe because it would hurt Obama seems to be their past time, never mind who was in charge when we were attacked, or who was in charge when the economy tanked. And do they, or Sarah Palin have our best interest in mind? Do I really have to ask any of this?

And no, for the record, since you're boiling down the opposition to your addled Alaskan horror-show to some perceived elitist wash, against hunters, it is not because she can fire a gun and skin a moose. That doesn't automatically disqualify a candidate. How it counts as a credential, however, for the most difficult job on the planet, you have all yet to bother to explain.

Hate to vent about it, but I have to endure this throughout the holiday season now that this farce of a book is out on the shelves. And I won't get mad, 'cause y'all lost. Hope you keep losing, but could you find better ways to cope if and when you do?

Christopher Plummer's Tympani Room

Moneyball

Casually Idiotic Movie Parenting

Summer '11

More Than Meets the Eye (No Homo)

Norse Gods and Monsters

Brrrrreakbeat

Ffffact Vs Fiction

Beats and Breaks of 2010

Fair Game

Transpose Pup

Hunting Season

The Soci(opath)al Network

HEART YOU, CASSIUS

Jahweh Wept

I Stayed Up and Watched This Movie on Showtime in 1988

Head Scratchy Feet Thumpy

No Words

A Canard

Yay For Twitter and Us and Dance Music!

OH NO NO NO

CUUUUUTE

Huh

From The Producer of Craven Money Grab!

Caliente

in My Head For Days

Chautauqua

Not Fighters

Why Libertarians Are Crazier Than Shithouse Rats, Volume XLIV

YA HEARD!

Bye, Wade

Opposite Day

Citizenship

Attn Wing Nuts

F A T

Bugbears

He's Your President Too

Get 'em, Roger

No Right Not To Be Shocked

5 Dollars

IN July

Earth + Plastic

Don't Wannnna Clooooose My Eyyyyes.....

Always Amazed

Our Daily Mwomp

Sorry, Comrade.

Chastity Porn:

79 Fucking Explosive

Oldie but a Goodie

N@zis

Blind as a Newborn Kitten

*Sprays Diet Coke on Screen*

A Majority IS the Will of the People

Accuracy, Cont.

Army of One

South Dakota, Everyone

Oscar Predix

Always Wanted This

An Example...

It's Dutch, Bitch

Oh Bother

Required Viewing

But It's Ok

Idiocracy

Oh, For the Love of Beagles

University of &$#*&$

Squeee

Our President, Consitutional Scholar

In Other, Happier Posts

With This One.....

*Fnarp*

Blech-quiem.

Subhuman Garbage

Just The Facts, Ma'am.

What Decade Is It?

Wider Margine of Defeat

We've All Seen Avatar

9/11™ Happened

Lullaby for Gaia

Wish I Didn't Have to Politicize....

Sprays Diet Coke on Screen

Fnarp