Fantastic Four and the Silver Surfer: Old Skool Edition

Face.



"Hearts? Souls? I do not know their meaning, yet I know they are important. Ooooh, my head." - The One Known As The Silver Surfer

Rescue Dawn

In 1965, US fighter pilot Dieter Dengler was shot down over Laos during a top-secret bombing raid. He was soon captured and taken to a Viet Cong POW camp, where he was tortured and starved until he managed to escape into the dense surrounding jungle, headed for Thailand.

Director Werner Herzog recounted this story in the documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, and now he fictionalizes it with actor Christian Bale in the role of Dengler in Rescue Dawn. This new film finds Herzog still dealing with the classic themes that have permeated all his most famous work - the struggle of man against nature, most notably - but in a decidedly more mainstream, straight-forward and narrative manner than his previous work.

In fact, Herzog seems to purposefully remove any traces of himself from the film, almost like he's issuing a corrective for his intrusion into the scope of films like Grizzly Man and the original Little Dieter. (Not that I think Herzog doesn't belong in there. I love both of those films. But the connection is intentionally and plainly made when Herzog has Bale actually speak the line "Little Dieter needed to fly" early in this film. And it's hard to overlook the fact that Dieter tells this same story with Herzog's narration while this time around he remains not only silent but more reserved, buried behind his technical proficiency. Even the real military film, which Herzog mocked in voice-over in the documentary, is brought back, mocked in this film by Dieter and his fellow servicemen.

What's left, then, without the usual Herzogness, is just an exceedingly well-constructed, intense and surprisingly intimate adventure story about the near-inhuman reserves of courage, grit and determination that allowed Dengler to survive this ridiculously harrowing ordeal.



Bale's performance is very interesting, particularly in the early passages in the prison camp. (He lost his usual 55 pounds to film the role, which at this point isn't even surprising any more. It's like, "Oh, look, Bale's emaciated again...Yawn...")

Dieter's unflappable and cocky, a mix between Steve McQueen in The Great Escape and Tom Cruise from Top Gun, which isn't quite what you'd anticipate from a guy who's been dragged around a Laotian village and hung upside down with an ant's nest strapped to his face. (McQueen even got to keep his baseball!)

We only realize later that this inner calm is the only thing keeping Dengler alive. We're really seeing two parallel stories: Dengler's race to freedom and the fraying of his tenuous grip on reality. Is he so positive and forward-thinking because he's not entirely sane?

In the prison, Dengler meets some similarly unhinged long-time prisoners. Gene (Jeremy Davies, upsettingly thin and channeling Dennis Hopper from Apocalypse Now) has convinced himself that he and his fellow prisoners will be let go "any day now." He reacts with shock and horror to Dieter's escape plans. Duane (Steve Zahn), on the other hand, gradually warms to the idea of escape, if only because he's tired of sleeping each night chained to several other grown men, pooping his pants and eating bugs for protein.

This has got to be Zahn's best performance ever. He's suffering in every scene in which he appears; there are no good times for Duane and Dieter. Their friendship begins and ends amidst hardship and extreme trauma. Yet Zahn makes Duane charming, funny and likable. He's constantly injured or complaining, but he also seems like a fun person to be around. That can't be an easy combination to pull off. (A simple scene in which Dieter and Duane stock an imaginary fridge effectively and amusingly establishes the friendship that drives the entire film.)

This really strikes me as Herzog's central focus in Rescue Dawn, the juxtaposition of beauty and horror. (Okay, it's the central focus of at least 65-70% of his work, including Grizzly Man). One beautiful shot sums the whole thing up nicely:

We open on a caterpillar crawling along a lush, green leaf. A hand enters the frame - it's Dieter's - and removes the leaf, and we see Duane, filthy, balled up in the fetal position and deathly ill underneath. The world is a beautiful place, and perfectly suited for human life, but it's also brutally violent and terrifying. The place that appears the most vibrant and inviting is the worst and most inhospitable environment imaginable.

(Interestingly, Mel Gibson's Apocalypto takes the diametrically-opposite approach. As the danger facing the protagonist increases, the environment around him becomes more desolate and bleak. That scene with the creepy little girl pointing and chanting really drives the message home. How do you know a place is evil? Because it's ugly and filled with bad people. I'm not knocking Gibson's film, which I liked enough. Herzog's is better.)

Speaking of violence and terror, there really isn't as much action in this film as I had expected and certainly not when compared to Apocalypto. When all is said and done, Rescue Dawn is fairly low-key. Bear in mind that, for Herzog, any film that doesn't involve moving opera houses over mountains or conquering continents can officially be considered "low-key." Ambitious tactics and extravagant plans don't help Duane and Dieter survive in the Laotian jungle. Slow movement, careful planning, conservation of resources and pluck work far better.

Herzog takes his time; rather than rushing between incidents, he lets madness slowly creep in along the edges of the frame, eventually consuming his characters. There's a Kinski-esque element to both lead performances, with a constant state of panicked alertness morphs tragically into wild-eyed dementia. (I doubt, however, that either of them were tempted to pull a firearm on their director).

The guys trade back and forth a found shoe, worn down to almost nothing. Dieter suggests Duane put it on the foot that's more banged up, as if it could possibly make a difference, as if it will be better for his feet to give out here or 50 feet from here. Through it all, Dieter keeps his hopes up, he stays focused on making it to Thailand and getting back to America, on being a pilot once again. How could anyone possibly do it? That's the question at the heart of Rescue Dawn. How could even the most proud and vital human spirit take this kind of punishment?

Introducing...the Dramatic Hamster!

Greatest 5 seconds in recorded video history?

Forster to Suck Life Out of Freshly-Revived Bond Franchise

Goddamn motherfucking bitch. This is pretty much the worst possible news for the James Bond franchise...

Filmmaker Marc Forster, the man behind such acclaimed movies as racial drama "Monster's Ball" and Peter Pan story "Finding Neverland," was named on Tuesday as director of the next James Bond adventure.

Forster will direct the untitled 22nd Bond outing from a script he and Oscar-winning screenwriter Paul Haggis will develop from a draft by previous Bond collaborators Neil Purvis and Robert Wade, the studio and producers said.

Oh, shit, Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, why stop with just hiring the geniuses behind Finding Neverland and Crash to continue your series of action films. Couldn't we get Zach Braff and Nickelback to collaborate on a soundtrack, a la the classic Dinosaur Jr/Del tha Funkee Homosapien mash-up for Judgement Night? Oh, oh, and for Second Unit Director, Uwe Boll! Ed Wood can do the costumes!

The choice of Forster marks an apparent change in creative emphasis from "Casino Royale" director Martin Campbell, best known for his work in action-adventure films, including 1995's "GoldenEye," which introduced Pierce Brosnan as Bond.

Mmm, yes, indeed. Whereas Casino Royale was an exciting and well-made piece of entertainment, this new Bond film promises, based on the creator's resumes, to be an unwatchably maudlin heap of excrement. Quite the change in creative emphasis, that...

I'm sure Forster has ALL SORTS of terrific ideas for where to take these characters.

"Let's see...how many classic characters am I allowed to kill? Oh, can Moneypenny develop some sort of terminal illness? Then, as she's withering away on her deathbed (but...you know...still hot...), she finally confesses her true feelings for James. Then, we find out that the adorable little scamp, Rusty, who James has been secretly sending through spy school died off camera in a tragic boating accident! Oh, that'll have the old ladies welling up for sure!"

Fantastic Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer

I loathed and detested the first Fantastic Four movie. It felt like a 90 minute commercial, selling me on the idea of seeing a Fantastic Four movie, which was very silly, as I had already paid $10 to do that very thing. Like Bryan Singer's first X-Men film, Tim Story's Fantastic Four movie was all lead-in and literally nothing else. Just as the stories begin to get interesting, the thing's over.

Fortunately, Singer's X-Men series took a major leap forward with X2, a large and ambitious adventure film that massively expanded the scope of the original and took more advantage of the franchise's long history and enormous stable of characters.

Fantastic Four 2 isn't an improvement on that kind of level. A lot of the flaws from the first film remain: egregious product placement, a lazily-drawn, predictable, scattered narrative filled with logic gaps, as well as a general blandness. Story's film quite literally deals with the destruction of the entire planet, but there's never a feeling of high stakes or a moment of genuine intensity. Without hyperbole, PIXAR films uniformly have more urgency and place their characters in more directly threatening, dark situations than these Fantastic Four films. And though more of the jokes work this time out than the last, the humor is extremely corny throughout, almost as if Stan Lee himself had come out of retirement to ghostwrite some of the dialogue.

Still, having said all of that, this new film is significantly better than the first outing. I'd go so far as to say that it's better than this summer's more-anticipated Spider-Man 3 and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. Those films both felt like pointless and labored attempts to squeeze some more life out of their respective franchises, while the Fantastic Four universe, meanwhile, is just starting to come into its own.



The superhero genre has turned into such a dour snoozefest, I think a franchise like Fantastic Four starts to seem more appealing. Instead of taking the Raimi/Singer tack of setting fanciful, oversized comic book action in a realistic real-world setting, Story has really embraced the Marvel Universeness of the Fantastic Four's world. Admittedly, he's spared the cliched "secret identity" storyline by the comics themselves - Reed Richards and his amazing family are famous, after all - but his desire to just make a goofy live-action cartoon comes through in every frame. Whether or not it's entirely faithful to the comics, it's fun, and definitely in the spirit of the classic Fantastic Four cartoon series. On that level, I found it entertaining, and surprisingly nostalgic for a movie starring Jessica Alba.

The film opens in outer space, as a creepy space cloud named Galactus destroys a faraway planet. From admist the debris speeds a lone, silver figure atop a surfboard. His destination...EARTH!

The Surfer's arrival is poorly timed. He interrupts the wedding of Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffudd) and Sue Storm (Jessica Alba), which has already been put off several times for scientific/superheroic reasons. This conflict, whether Reed and Sue will ever get around getting married, actually takes up the bulk of the film's running time. Seriously, I swear. It's the main conflict; the stuff with the end of the world takes a backseat until the last 30 minutes.

When I said the film was scattered, I really really meant it. There's not really a logical progression of events. The Silver Surfer (voiced by Laurence Fishburne) begins to visit random locations on Earth, digging large holes that create all kinds of destruction. The Fantastic Four try to intercept him a few times to figure out what the hell's going on, but he's too fast and/or powerful for them.

Also, contact with the Surfer gives the Human Torch (Evans) the ability to swap powers with his teammates. And a mean general (Andre Braugher) with nothing much to do in the story insists on bringing in Victor Von Doom (Julian McMahon, regrettably reprising his horrible performance from the first film) to help the Fantastic Four.



Bringing back Dr. Doom, the one character irredeemably botched in the first film, was just a terrible mistake. He has very little to do in this film until the end, when he steals the Silver Surfer's surfboard and flies around like an idiot and doesn't do a whole lot. This plotline actually fits the character better than his ridiculous storyline the first time around - Dr. Doom really did plot to steal the powers of heroes in the comics - but McMahon is just way too soap-opera hammy to feel threatening as Doom and the visual of him atop a flying surfboard is just silly, not cool in any way, shape or form.

The chases and fights between the Surfer and the Fantastic Four, on the other hand, come off really well in this entry. I particularly liked the initial scene, in which Johnny chases the Surfer down the Eastern seaboard. You really get a sense for the incredible speed at which the characters are flying. It's a great sequence.

So, just like after Brett Ratner's X-Men: The Last Stand, I feel conflicted. Ratner and Story, unlike the top-tier comic book directors, apparently feel more free to take on large-scale, monumental, epic-scale stories and to play around with the canon a little bit. I admire the fact that their films aim high. I personally thought that all the Marvel outer space drama stuff could never really work in a movie, and that's some of the best material in Story's film. So there you go.

At the same time, these are hugely flawed films by guys who are either constrained by budget or talent. Some of Fantastic Four 2 is really good, and it's overtly bright, colorful, campy style really worked for me, against my expectations, but the finished product is still kind of disappointing. Still, I'd probably go and see a Part III, which is probably the only kind of endorsement Tim Story cares about.

Unicorn Charles

Apparently, this "Charlie the Unicorn" cartoon has been a mainstay of the Internet for well over a year now. I had never heard of it before, but built a Mahalo page for it this morning, which you can check out here.



This thing is pretty strange. Two enthusiastic unicorns with whiny voices wake up a grumpy unicorn named Charlie and beg him to go with them to Candy Mountain. They speak in halting simple sentences and repeat things a lot.

"Hey, Charlie, we found a map to Candy Mountain. Candy Mountain, Charlie! Come with us to Candy Mountain. Yeah, Charlie! It'll be an adventure. We're going on an adventure, Charlie!"

It just goes on and on like this.

Now, okay, it does built up to a decent punchline, and I'm sure the point of much of the build-up is to be annoying. (After all, Charlie is also clearly annoyed by these other two unicorns).

But I'm still kind of perplexed as to why this has become such a phenomenon. I can usually appreciate running Internet gags, like goofy photos of cats with silly captions or the Star Wars Kid or Homestar Runner. But to me, this is just really really annoying.

I suppose a lot of humor for kids of a certain age is just naturally annoying and repetitive. Really, I envy the kids who get a huge kid out of this. I'm sure, once you think it's funny, endless amounts of joy can be squeezed from dropping "Charlie" references into daily conversation. (People have been making Charlie mash-ups for some time, putting the audio behind video game images or scenes from CW shows).

Great Moments in Conservative Humor

Here's Dennis Miller discussing how Harry Reid looks old and encourages al-Qaeda:



Now, leaving aside the lunatic thesis of Dennis Miller's latest "rant," that it's borderline traitorous to point out how badly our President's war has gone, it's a perfect PERFECT example of my Great Moments in Conservative Humor thesis...That conservatives can't be funny because they are mean-spirited bullies who can't get over their hatred for the Other long enough to write a halfway-decent joke.

It's all there in Miller's little speech. He means to undermine Reid, but just makes himself look ridiculous in the process, like an angry little man lashing out at someone more powerful and significant than he. (And I'm not even a Harry Reid fan. I'd be perfectly happy to laugh to a series of cruel jokes at the callow and ineffective Reid's expense.) This kind of bilious screed isn't really funny; it's clear that Miller detests Reid, whom he expressly insists should never speak publicly again. (This gets the biggest applause of the night, an obvious nod to the pervasive authoritarian/eliminationist streak in Fox News coverage.)

Now, yes, Jon Stewart told Tucker Carlson to go away and stop talking, but not on his comedy show; he was a guest on Carlson's "news show" at the time and made that aside as part of a larger, and to my mind wholly sensible, argument. Stewart's attitude on "The Daily Show" is one of bemused concern. He's worried about the fate of our nation, sure, but he's also able to take a step back and laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. The emotional connection is with the viewer, not the Party or the Issue.

Miller doesn't even try to connect with his audience. (To be honest, this has always been one of his faults as a performer). There's nothing about Miller's performance, really, that indicates he finds Reid funny or intends to make us laugh.

"[Reid's] is a mediocre man's Thermopylae."

300 references...Nice.

"Ironic that the Senator from Vegas would be such a dim bulb."

GOOD LORD THAT JOKE SUCKS! In fact, it's so hacky, I actually think Dennis Miller might have stolen that joke from Carlos Mencia! Here's your chance, Ned! Find out the next time Miller's going to be at the Laugh Factory and pull a Rogan on him. Oh, that would be so sweet!

Much of Miller's monologue here is composed of direct insults, and the more descriptive portions sound like the preamble to rounding up a posse and calling for the man's head rather than a bit of incisive satire. NOTE: I never find direct insults funny. Anyone remember the film Grumpy Old Men. Someone clearly thought that the idea of Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon hurling plain-spoken invective at one another for 90 minutes would be funny. Instead, it's just embarrassing. Most of the exchanges consist of "You're a moron," "Shut up idiot" and the like. Miller's routine here is similar, calling Reid just about everything he could get past the Fox News Dept. of Standards and Practices.

I mean, the words that come out of Reid's "ashen piehole" sound like they're "oozing from a stuck caulking gun"? Jokes like this are why Edgar Allen Poe didn't get invited to many Friar's Club roasts...

Miller's extended simile jokes used to actually build to something funny. Here's one I remember, though I don't recall the subject of the joke.

"Finding a BLANK in the BLANK is harder than finding an outline of a naked girl on a mudflap on the back of a 16-wheeler in the parking lot of the Lilith Fair."

Not the best joke ever, sure, but it built up and had a punchline. Now it just seems like Miller's tries to squeeze as much hateful rhetoric into a single sentence as possible. The jokes don't build so much as they congeal.

"The bad guys look to you to reinforce their belief that we are the weak horse and eminently conquerable. You are making that assertion so easy for them that they no doubt view you as the derriere of said horse."

Ugh...awful...

And, okay, yes, as an actual political statement, it's all completely senseless and vile. The "bad guys" give a shit what Harry Reid has to say? Most Americans couldn't pick him out of a line-up, let alone explain his position on the war. You think the guys who actually go out and try to blow up our troops day-in and day-out are paying any closer attention to the nuances of all of our Congresspeople's stated positions?

And, what's Miller's solution? The most powerful man in the Senate shouldn't criticize the President or else terrorists will think he, and by extension all Americans, are pussies? This is how middle-school students think, not grown-ups.

Some of Miller's claims are genuinely unbelievable. As in, I can't believe an adult male, let alone one who previously had a reputation as somewhat intelligent, would make these sorts of juvenile arguments on television. A critic of a failed war is a "constant bringdown"? A fucking bringdown? Oh, Dennis Miller, so sorry if Harry Reid is putting you off so terribly. I know you can barely make it through the day, with your comfortable salary and relative fame, without having to hear about your government marching a generation of American women and men to their deaths. It's all so very bothersome.

Reid deserves this drubbing, we're told, because he's "unrelentingly bleak." Yes, by all means, politicians should be shiny and happy! Cause it's just that kind of world.

Who need a Gloomy Gus interrupting our collective groove all the time? I wouldn't want to have a beer with Harry Reid, who's all old and defeatist, so therefore he should be drummed out of politics. Yeah, that makes sense. (Of course, Reid's not the one who went on TV for several years warning about all kinds of imminent terrorist attacks that never happened. Apparently, Miller feels that predicting millions of American deaths on a regular basis, Cheney-style, isn't bleak. Grim, sure, but not bleak.)

Miller also quotes from David Fincher's Fight Club in here, but I don't get the reference. Is he saying that America is Fight Club? And that Reid's betraying us by talking about what we're doing? There are two ways to read this: Miller didn't really get the point behind Fight Club, or Miller has embraced the straight-up fascist ideal of shutting up and surrendering your will to the State. (I mean...we all realize that Fincher's film doesn't actually agree with Tyler Durden's batshittery, right?...That's why Norton has to shoot himself in the face at the end?)

I would think Fight Club is a simple enough film for Dennis Miller to comprehend, so I'm tempted to go with Option B. But then again, he clearly didn't see the inherent contradiction of closing out an extended monologue on national television about Harry Reid with the observation that the man "barely matters." So anything's possible.

Da Cribbage

SuperDeluxe brings us this brilliant parody of both French director Michel Gondry and MTV's Cribs.

Some really fantastic little touches in here for anyone who has seen Gondry's uber-twee Science of Sleep. "I built this car myself out of a magic trick my father taught me when I was a boy."

The Greenhouse Effect

Several of you have written me comments or e-mails asking how you can become a Mahalo guide. I knew there were some plans in the pipeline so I've held off from saying anything...

UNTIL NOW.

Presenting The Mahalo Greenhouse


We provide you with everything you need to make your own pages, and if they're good, we'll pay you to put them on Mahalo! $10 per search to start...and it just goes up from there.

CEO Jason talks a bit more about the idea here, and there's been a lot of discussion already on the blogs. (The thing only launched yesterday...) We've already received a lot of applications, and I think we're only going to take a select number of Part Time Guides (PTG's, in Mahalo-speak), so if this sounds interesting to you, I'd suggest some measure of haste in getting your application in.

More Hilarity from the set of "Knocked Up"

It's a job like any other, so I'm sure it gets dreary after a while, but it looks like they were having a lot of fun on the set of Knocked Up.

Massive Egregious Sopranos Spoilers To Follow

WARNING: DON'T READ THIS UNLESS YOU HAVE SEEN THE FINAL EPISODE

Okay, so, for a second there...I was really pissed off.

They make us wait a whole season, they build up this whole face-off with New York, they go through all this terrorist-FBI nonsense and then it just ends with no closure whatsoever, while we're listening to Journey?

But then I gave it a few minutes...and I realized how much sense it made. So, okay, clearly Tony does get shot, and the last thing we see is the last thing he sees - the doorway at the front of the restaurant as Meadow's about to enter. The entire show has been, in many ways, about the conflict between Tony's suburban home life and the violence and horror of his criminal occupation. So it ends with the sudden and permanent interruption of Tony's life as he enjoys a family dinner, the ultimate ritual of suburban familyhood. We feel it as he would. "Hey, what just happened? I was all set to eat dinner with the family here!"

(You'll recall last week, when Tony remembered talking with Bobby about being killed, about how it all happens so fast, you don't even know what's going on. Foreshadowing!)

But beyond the significance of that final scene, it was just a brilliant episode throughout. I noticed that it was far more skittish and chaotic than a typical entry, skipping between brief scenes of no more than a minute or two for much of the time. At first, I suspected this was an attempt to tie up all kinds of loose story threads, as if writer/director David Chase had simply run out of time. But on further consideration, I think it was probably intentional. Possibly as a way to compensate for the audience's extreme expectations, that this one hour was going to "make sense" of the 85 that had come before, which of course isn't even possible. Or perhaps it was simply a reflection of Tony's increasing agitation and anxiety of his safety and that of his family.

The scene where he visits Junior was one of this final episode's best. Recognizing that the enemy he's been hating for months no longer remembers who he is, Tony begins to probe around the edges of his uncle's awareness. Does the old man remember his own brother? Does he remember that the two of them used to run North Jersey? All that power, all those years of scheming, and now it's all lost. He can't even remember.

Tony, as it turns out, was the same way, always intending to do more and to feel better but never quite getting there. Once he's dead, does all that struggle and inner turmoil add up to anything? Even if he had survived (and I don't think he did), it wouldn't be much of a life. Ever-dwindling returns on investment from an ever-shrinking crew. This season made clear that everyone pretty much considers the New Jersey mob to be small time. Phil Leotardo thought that three hits would bring down the entire organization, after all.

(Talk about someone incapable of change. His indifference toward compromise caused him to be literally crushed, in a classic bit of David Chase gallows humor, by a van containing his own grandchildren.)

People have compared the show to classical tragedy, but it's more like one of those parodies of classical tragedy that satirically elevate pedestrian or lowly narratives to the level of an epic.

Tony's just a thug. Chase has given us this opportunity over the last seven years to examine him closely, to see that even a thug still has a soul, but in this final season, he had to pull back and remind us once again that this is a terrible man who does terrible things. I guess it's the only responsible thing to do.

The scene where he offers A.J. a real chance to do something with his life, one that reflected some amount of attention to the boy's interests and needs, struck me as a real positive development for Tony, which pretty much signaled that Chase would have no choice but to kill him by the end of the episode. Finally, for the first time, Tony seems capable of adjusting his expectations to satisfy someone he loves. Rather than lash out at A.J. for not being the son he wants him to be, Tony alters his approach and comes up with an equitable solution.

This is the one thing he's never been able to do, so he may have actually learned a little something. And that's not really how things work on "The Sopranos." Once you gain a little genuine insight and prove capable of genuine growth, you're generally killed. I just realized I'm going to have to begin referring to the show in past tense. How depressing...

Why Be An Angry Atheist?

Seriously...I don't understand. Why does an acknowledgment that religion is kind of dumb necessarily carry with it a need to be so condescending and haughty? In the course of a single day, how many people will I interact with who agree with me about everything? Even everything important, as in moral codes or models for appropriate public behavior or views about humanity's place in the universe? Very few, if any. Everyone's different.

So why is it that my fellow atheists insist upon being so aggressive about challenging religion? I'm not saying that we shouldn't defend ourselves, or that we shouldn't feel free to express an opinion openly about other faiths or lack thereof. I enjoy this freedom all the time. But it's perfectly simple to let people know where you stand on the issue of religion without calling them stupid or belittling their beliefs. See, I don't like it when Christianists and wannabe theocrats try to exert their religious beliefs on me, but likewise I find it counter-productive to repeatedly insist on the rightness of my perspective.

To me, this impulse plays into the pervasive stereotypes about atheists: that we are angry or mean or bitter people, that we are simply contrarians by nature, that we don't admire humanity and reason so much as we loathe morality, God and family. None of these things are true, and yet their are reinforced by half-assed caustic anti-faith screeds...a-like a-this a-one:

Why Won't God Heal Amputees for some reason feels that humiliating and mocking the religious is the best way to get them to see things from another perspective. It clearly feels that its titular query - about God healing the wounded - definitively disproves the existence of God for all time, always.

Which is just dumb. I mean, I've never really believed seriously in God, and even I can argue my way out of that one.

For this experiment, we need to find a deserving person who has had both of his legs amputated. For example, find a sincere, devout veteran of the Iraqi war, or a person who was involved in a tragic automobile accident.

Now create a prayer circle like the one created for Jeanna Giese. The job of this prayer circle is simple: pray to God to restore the amputated legs of this deserving person. I do not mean to pray for a team of renowned surgeons to somehow graft the legs of a cadaver onto the soldier, nor for a team of renowned scientists to craft mechanical legs for him. Pray that God spontaneously and miraculously restores the soldier's legs overnight, in the same way that God spontaneously and miraculously cured Jeanna Giese and Marilyn Hickey's mother.

If possible, get millions of people all over the planet to join the prayer circle and pray their most fervent prayers. Get millions of people praying in unison for a single miracle for this one deserving amputee. Then stand back and watch.

What is going to happen? Jesus clearly says that if you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer. He does not say it once -- he says it many times in many ways in the Bible.

And yet, even with millions of people praying, nothing will happen.

Every religious person I have ever met would concede that God doesn't answer every human prayer. This argument is a complete strawman. Different religions would have different ways of answering this particular problem, but it's not like the schmendrick who runs this website was the first person to ever come up with this line of reasoning. Maybe God caused that person's legs to be amputated for some larger purpose, alright? So eventually, he'll get around to answering the person's prayers in a roundabout way without physically returning his or her legs. There. Done. I mean, we're talking about an all-knowing, all-powerful deity. If such a thing really did exist, we wouldn't necessarily expect It to obey all of our laws of fairness, consistency and timeliness.

Take a look at this 10 minute video, in which a nasally, ANGRY narrator informs you of 3 things:

(1) You're an idiot

(2) He's going to miraculously free you from your delusions

(3) But, seriously, you're a fucking idiot

How is this in any way helpful? The guy opens the video by making some extremely bold statements:

If you are a Christian, you are about to begin a fascinating journey.

I would never in one million years say this at the beginning of a presentation. Talk about setting yourself up for failure. This is what producer Joel Silver does before every film of his opens, and it usually doesn't work out that well. ("Swordfish is going to change the way you think about action movies, the Internet...and yourselves...")

Still, he gets away with it every once in a while, when the film turns out to be The Matrix or something and audiences flip for it. Regrettably, the folks at WWGHA do not have a blockbuster kind of argument.

It all boils down to this: because you don't believe in ALL the world's religions, and the faith of their adherents is just as strong as yours, you must concede that almost all of world's religious people are totally wrong, and therefore you are most likely wrong. After all, what reason do we have for believing that our holy books or writs are MORE CORRECT that those of other faiths and cultures, whose practicioners have passed them down and fervently practiced them for just as long as our people or longer?

This is certainly something that occurred to me as a child. I think being Jewish calls your attention in particular to this issue. The most popular religion in America is an explicit rejection of Judaism. Despite the unifying political rhetoric between Jew and Fundamentalist Christian, most Americans feel that the Jews believe in an outdated religion that has long-since been revitalized. So any believing Jew must make peace with the fact that they're going against the grain.

But this is not revolutionary thinking that's likely to alter the perception of someone religious, particularly because it's delivered in this hectoring tone that's just unpleasant. I mean...I agree with the narrator for the most part, and yet I still disliked him and found him unconvincing.

In the next ten minutes it will become clear to you that your belief in God is delusional.

The problem is that your delusion, combined with the delusion of billions of other religious people like you, is hurting us as a species. It does not matter if you are a fundamentalist Christian, a moderate Christian or a casual Christian. Your delusion is hurting us.

Again, this leap in logic has never fully been made clear to me. Yes, most people are religious. Yes, most people are also violent. Sometimes (not all the time!), people excuse their violent behavior with religion. This does not, DOES NOT, necessarily indicate that religion incites people to violence!

I mean, that's just silly. Look at the issue of, say, spousal abuse. I'm sure many men who are arrested for spousal abuse (not that all spousal abusers are men...just the overwhelming majority...) have lame excuses for why they needed to hit their wives. But we don't accept these excuses at face value! Of course we don't! There's no one saying, "If we could only keep women pregnant and in the kitchen and stop their constant backtalking, we could end spousal abuse in this country!"

Because the real reasons guys hit their wives are alcoholism or drug abuse or that they're just a dumb violent asshole, and we all know it. And the reason there's so much violence in the world is that people are angry, violent, greedy fucks. And we all know it. And it has nothing to do with God, Ganesha, Mohammad, Jesus, the Prophet Elijah or anyone else. Being an atheist is just recognizing that those are either fictional or historical characters; it doesn't say anything about believing that they are responsible for the downfall of humanity or the horrors of the the 20th or 21st Centuries.

Yet this guy just brashly states it outwardly in a video that's meant to appeal to Christians. Guys...That's not gonna work. At all. In order to be convinced by your rhetoric, a subject must find you sufficiently trustworthy and charismatic. A good first step would be to convince them that you think very much like them but for one or two crucial, correctable differences. Not to call them delusional and say that they're hurting our species, and then move into your arguments.

Okay, moving away from the WWGHA crowd, let's take a look at this blog post, about the divide between "mean atheists" and "good atheists."

What it really comes down to is this: There are two types of atheists, which (for simplicity) I'll call the "nice atheists" and the "mean atheists." As P. Z. Myers points out, it's absurd to call atheists "militant" since it's not as if they're burning down churches -- they're just criticizing religion. However, it's not unreasonable to suggest that some atheists are not very nice.

The difference between the mean atheists and the nice atheists is that the mean atheists think that religion is ninety-nine parts pure stupidity mixed with one part lying, opportunistic con artists. And they want to tell that to religious people whenever they're asked to "respect" someone's faith.

This is just stupid. The divide has nothing to do with being "nice" or "mean." It's about goals. The atheists blogger C.L. Hanson refers to as "mean" want to eradicate religion from the public sphere entirely, or even eliminate its very existence. The atheists that are called "nice" aren't any friendly as people; they just don't give a shit what people say or believe, as long as they personally don't have to believe it.

I'm not religious because I think it's silly and I don't want to waste my time with it. I think we'd all be better off accepting such a philosophy, of course - if I thought such a belief made people worse off, I wouldn't believe it myself - but when it comes right down to it, I'd rather not get involved in what everyone else does. Their business, you know? Just like I don't care what home computers other people use, or their favorite late-night snack, or their masturbatory practices. I have my own preferences, and they have theirs, and that's how it ought to be.

I think all atheists believe religion is just about equally stupid. The notion that there's 1% of me that thinks religion should be handled with respect is very strange; where did Hanson even come up with this stuff? If you don't believe in Islam or Christianity or Mormonism or Scientology, it seems ridiculous from the outside. That has absolutely nothing to do with ones approach to dealing with religion. Can't we interface at all with ideas we dislike?

I mean, I'm not a libertarian, but am I not capable of discussing their ideas with them? Should my goal instead be the eradication of that entire system of thought? I think these sort of notions fuel a lot of our political and social discourse any more. Politics is no longer about ensuring your perspective is represented in some kind of larger Grand Compromise. It's about the utter and complete defeat of any and all opposition to your unitary, uncompromised will.

Like I said, I just don't get it. To me, so-called "mean" atheism reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world works. I mean, it's great you guys figured out God's not at the center of the universe, but that doesn't mean you're there either.

Gawker is Several Years Late to the Party

Here's the latest breaking news from the hot gossip site:

Zach Braff Is Without Worth

Well, you don't say...

The piece then goes on to praise Garden State while insisting that Braff should be shunned because he's not hot enough.

Zach snuck his way into famousosity through Garden State, a tour de force which singlehandledly called a cultural truce between the I Heart Huckabees/Wolf Parade/Unbearable Lightness of Being crowd and those who list The DaVinci Code among their favorite books on Friendster. For a brief moment, hipsters laid down their iPods and douchbankers put aside their engraved moneyclips, and the world united to agree that this was a good movie.

What the hell are you talking about? That movie's terrible and most reasonably intelligent people could tell! And this whole notion of an I Heart Huckabees/Wolf Parade crowd is just silly reference-dropping. I know many many people who like one of those things and not the other; it hardly represents a unified front of taste. (I could maybe accept an I Heart Huckabees/Decemberists crowd...maybe). I personally happen to like both I Heart Huckabees and Wolf Parade a great deal, but then, I hated Garden State.

Maybe in another few years, Gawker will manage to slam Zach Braff in a way that makes sense, but this is a solid start.

I Know Why The Caged Turd Sings

Okay, we have to talk about this Paris Hilton thing. Or rather, we don't have to talk about Paris Hilton, but I am going to.

I put Vladimir Putin on the front page of Mahalo just now because he's involved in an ongoing news story that is far more important than a reckless moron with a few million dollars to throw around. But I know what the people really want to hear about...Paris has held strong as the #2 most popular page for this entire week.

And who could resist the giddy thrill of seeing an image like this?



Still, I have my reservations...

It's not like I feel bad for Paris Hilton. She's a spoiled idiot whose very obnoxiousness stems from her core belief that the rules don't apply to her. So what better way to teach her a lesson than to harshly apply the rules to her? I say, drive home the message...Excessively apply the rules to her. Apply rules to her that don't even exist yet. A fake mustache must be worn at all mealtimes. No going to the bathroom in anyone in any of the adjoining cells is chewing gum. You can watch TV, but only a single tape containing 5 "Maude" reruns, the last of which cuts off halfway through.

I won't deny a bit of satisfaction at seeing a rich white person actually go to jail for doing something illegal instead of just weaseling out of it as they always seem to. Ken Lay actually had to die to escape justice.

But Paris herself is not really the problem. I mean, she is a problem, and she clearly, as this sheriff says, "has severe problems," but she doesn't deserve this fate any more than the millions of other spoiled, clueless American assholes who think and behave in exactly the same manner, but do so less publicly. Say what you will about Paris Hilton, but she's well aware of her own plastic superficiality. It's her brand - she loudly advertises her lifelong devotion to trend-chasing, mindless consumerism, drug addiction and apathy. Everyone else pretends to give a shit, and then does these same things anyway out of habit.

What I'm trying to say is that Paris Hilton sucks, but we suck even more for creating her in the first place. (Of course we invented Paris Hilton! No one person could will this kind of attention upon themselves. We have to agree to pay attention, and of course, we do! Whole websites have popped up for no other reason than providing up-to-the-second gossip about a handful of young, exceptionally boring individuals.)

Okay, having said all that, I think Paris having to go back to jail and finish out her sentence is a very good thing. Now, if it were up to me, I probably would have chosen to make her pay a fine or do some community service or some other kind of punishment that carries with it less spectacle. There's no need for the justice system of law enforcement to feed the monster that is the 24 Hour a Day Paris Hilton News Machine. Punish her, fine, but why turn it into a soap opera? And of course they must have known that's what would happen if they put America's Sweettart in fucking PRISON.

It may have been intended as one, but I don't think this is going to be a teaching moment for young Americans who might look up to Paris Hilton. (I know, I know, but it happens). The potential is there: someone who has flaunted our standards for public decency and decorum on several occasions, who frequently acts in blatant disregard of the law, will now have to own up to the consequences of her actions and face justice. "See, young Americans," the situation seems to say, "don't be like Paris Hilton. Everyone gets their comeuppance in the end."

And if she had been allowed to go free after less than two full days because she got all weepy and wanted her Mommy...well, then the whole notion of our justice system kind of loses all meaning. Once you permit people - under whatever circumstances - to opt out of jail, you open up the largest can of worms in the history of that dumb cliche. Plus, it really does send a horrible message. If you are white, and wealthy, and a decent enough actress to co-star in a House of Wax remake, you are potentially above the law. The government in this scenario takes the same laissez-faire policy towards fraud as Ferris Bueller's Parents. "Our little princess couldn't possibly be acting hysterical so we'll let her go!"

This whole thing doesn't really make any sense to me at all. I understand that we throw a lot of people in prison for stupid crimes as a way of keeping them off the streets and making everyone feel uncomfortable, so there isn't a lot of room. But surely a prison sentence actually still means something. When I went to Outdoor Ed. in elementary school and got really homesick and told them I wanted to go home, they made me wait a full day before calling my parents, and it could not have been less important for me to stay. All we actually did that week was go on night walks, eat ghastly "food" and learn idiotic sing-along lyrics.

Paris went to jail for committing a felony and managed to get out with a few tears and some well-timed hysterics.

Baca also said that he reassigned Hilton based on "her severe medical problems," and confirmed TMZ's original story that her condition was mental. Baca said that her "increasingly deteriorating problems" were evaluated and added, "This lady has some severe problems."

Baca added that she was medicated when she originally entered the jail system ... and "I can't trust her tenuous status," referring to her mental state. "She had a severe problem," said Baca, "I need more cooperation from the courts and from the city attorney's office."

For now, Baca says he will comply with the court order and keep her behind bars -- "If there's any further deterioration, hopefully we'll be able to address it."

Why no specifics? What did she actually do that was so horrible? I mean...aren't prisons equipped to deal with prisoners who don't want to be there? It's kind of their whole reason for existing. If prisoners weren't going to raise any fuss, we could keep them in Motel 6's. It'd be cheaper.

Seriously. Why not a psych ward? An infirmary? Solitary? It's a goddamn jail, man! Come up with something! First sign of a problem and you fucking let the prisoner go? Does Beecher know about this? It could have saved him a significant amount of pain and hardship.

UPDATE: Radar Magazine helps shed some light on this strange behavior of letting a convicted felon go home early for no good reason:

Did family money buy Paris Hilton a temporary get-out-of-jail card?

Sheriff Lee Baca, the Los Angeles law-enforcement official who ordered Hilton released from jail after serving only three days in her 45-day sentence, accepted a $1,000 campaign donation last year from William Barron Hilton—Paris's grandfather. That contribution constituted the maximum amount allowable under California campaign rules.

Now it all makes sense...

The Thrilling Joke

I may be looking forward to Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins follow-up more than any other film. There's lots I want to see coming up, for sure, like Sicko, There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men, American Gangster and that Spike Jonze-directed, Dave Eggers-scripted Where the Wild Things Are adaptation that I can't believe actually exist.

Most of those will open before The Dark Knight. Dang. I seriously can't wait. The first film was, in my opinion, the best comic book movie ever made by a considerable margin. And the second one features The Joker. And Not Katie Holmes!

Anyway, here's a photo from the set with Heath Ledger in his Joker make-up. Because film studios are ridiculous bastards, he happens to be standing BEHIND a pane of glass, obscuring the image. But it's still...you know...cool.



My thanks to Jason for e-mailing me this picture.

Mahalo on Wikipedia

w00t!11!



Click for bigness.

Do You...Mahalo?

So, after hearing me gush about the Mahalo experience for a week now, wouldn't you all like to come work here yourselves?

Right now on the Mahalo Blog (or Bloghalo, as I like to call it), Mark has issued a call for new developers. Opportunities to work as Guides will come eventually, and I'll keep you all posted, but for the moment, we could really use some HTML, CSS and PHP developers to join the team. The lunches are largely free, and we just got a ping pong table!

Jonah Hill is Funny

This deleted scene from Knocked Up is more funny than 90% of actual scenes that appear in mainstream Hollywood comedies. I've watched it three times already:



You know what else is funny? Well, sort of? LOLcats!

Twitter, Happier, More Productive

So I signed up for Twitter the other day, the site that's essentially a mini-blog. You post brief updates of what you're doing at any given moment, and this creates kind of an RSS feed of your life that friends can check in on. I've put the handy little Twitter bubble right there on my sidebar, so you can check out my most recent post.

I know a lot of people enjoy this service, but they all must be significantly more popular and better equipped than myself, because it's doing pretty much nothing for me. Because I don't have a fancy phone with screens and keyboards that flip out from unexpected places, I can't pull up Twitter on the go and actually type in what I'm doing when I'm doing stuff. And because I only have 3 or 4 friends who even own computers, it's not like I have a ton of people with whom I need to keep in touch.

So why did I bother signing up for Twitter? I'm not sure, and I think I might just fold up the account, because it's a ton of pressure. I feel like I should be posting something to Twitter all the time, even when I'm not doing anything. Everyone who looks at my Twitter account will realize I have nothing to do. Why would I enroll in a service that will advertise my lameness?

Knocked Up

If I were President, every girl in America would be legally mandated to watch and write an essay about Judd Apatow's Knocked Up. It suggests that the greatest happiness in the world can be found in dating a funny, overweight, slovenly Jewish guy with goofy roommates and twin tastes for geek culture and marijuana. If even 2% of the attractive American female community took Judd's advice, I'd be set for LIFE!

The Semitic stoner in question is Ben (Seth Rogan, of Apatow's 40 Year Old Virgin and "Freaks and Geeks"), a hapless loser with no job or life who lucks into a one-night stand with the gorgeous and seemingly-unattainable Alison (Katherine Heigl). She's celebrating her new on-air job with E! Entertainment Television, he's at the same bar on the wasting time with his familiar gaggle of burnouts and things just kind of escalate from there.

Apatow leads with his best material in these opening sequences. He's a master of writing funny dialogue that doesn't sound written. There are a lot of great little moments and snippets of classic dialogue throughout Knocked Up, and none of it has the setup-punchline feeling of all sitcom writing and most film comedy writing. Apatow's characters speak in voices that are entirely their own. They don't constantly fall back on quips or self-referential humor or catchphrases to garner laughs. They don't rush through their conversations to lead to the next plot point, as you'd see in a film like Wedding Crashers. We get to know Ben, Alison, Alison's sister Debbie (Leslie Mann in a scene-stealing performance), Debbie's husband Pete (Paul Rudd, amusing as always) and Ben's misfit friends in environments that feel natural to them, in scenes that take time to develop and build.

This means that Apatow's films tend to run longer than most comedies (this one clocks in at just over 2 hours). Like The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up does start to wind down about 20 minutes before it actually ends. Though Apatow's a master at writing breezily funny chat/banter, particularly between tightly-knit circles of male friends, he seems unable to conceive of where to take his characters, Big Picture-wise. His films are shot through with personality and are extremely likable, but have little to no rewatch value. This one is more rewarding and less silly than the last, and Ben is a protagonist after my own heart, but it still kind of sputters out in predictable fashion, unsure of where to take its characters save the most obvious route.



Ben's surprised and delighted to hear from Alison a full two months after their lone tryst. He's crestfallen to hear that she's pregnant with his child, both because he finds the responsibility of fatherhood terrifying and because it means she wasn't calling because she found him irresistible.

The film here makes a pretty huge narrative leap that's never really mentioned, and that I found really odd.

Ben gets Alison pregnant, and she wants to have the baby. Okay, fine. But why does that mean she necessarily has to consider falling in love with him? It's basically taken as a given that, because they're going to have a kid together, they should try being a couple. Ben is immediately granted "boyfriend" status, post-baby bombshell, even though they slept together exactly once, she was revolted by him the next day and they proceeded to have no contact for 8 weeks.

Now, I realize this is a romantic comedy and it's about an unlikely couple brought together by an accidental pregnancy. I'm just saying that Ben should have to earn this relationship and never does. He kind of lucks into it, so we never really get a sense for his stake in the whole thing - his emotional connection to Alison and his baby and this new life he'll be starting - until the end of the movie. After 100 minutes of watching him desperately wish he could keep goofing off with his goony pals forever, his conversion to Responsible Family Man feels forced.

Apatow takes it even one step further and incorporates some of my all-time least favorite ongoing movie cliches. Whenever a character needs to radically change their life, to grow from an experience, they do one of a few things:

(1) Clean up his/her appearance, maybe even buying some new clothes or replacing glasses with contact lenses

(2) Stop inattentively watching TV/movies and start reading books with rapt interest

(3) Get a new job in a clean, efficient office

(4) Exercise

(5) Stop smoking pot

Believe it or not, Apatow manages to work in 2, 3, 4 AND 5. Lame lame lame. If there was a scene of Rogan trying on suits, please know that I was fully prepared to roll my eyes into the back of my head.

I hate that moment in a movie when I can feel one of these cliches coming on, and I just know we're going to get some ridiculous scene at the end, like in Wonder Boys, where the main character throws away his stash, thus instantly becoming a better person. Not because I think movies should extol the virtues of drug abuse, but because it's never that easy in life, and it's lazy writing. Moments like this are paint-by-numbers shorthand for something more difficult to express: the idea of real lasting change, which is what this movie is supposed to be all about.

Okay, so that's what I don't like. Just when it should be building towards some kind of actual emotional climax, Knocked Up falls back on mainstream, silly Hollywood devices and screenwriting tricks from the RKO era.

If it wasn't so fall-down funny for most of the time, I might have been more concerned. Rogan and Heigl are both terrific here, with Heigl getting bonus points because her character's arc is so difficult to pull off. Not only do we have to believe that this confident, together adult woman would want to babysit this man-child, we have to believe she'd fall in love with him and want to be a parent with him.

At one point, Alison's angry with Ben for not reading some of the parenting books they purchased together. We're talking about a guy whose hobby is taking bong rips while wearing a gas mask, whose career plan consists of watching Wild Things and writing down the minute-count when Denise Richards takes her bikini top off, and she's concerned that he didn't properly highlight "What to Expect When You're Expecting"?

But Heigl pulls it off, somehow. She and Rogan actually have some chemistry together. They make a more believable couple on screen than a lot of glamorous movie star pairings, even real-life glamorous couple Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and this was one aspect of Apatow's film I really enjoyed. Rather than getting laughs by exaggerating the characters, he's really tried to imagine two compatible people who it's possible to imagine together, despite several noteworthy differences. The romantic core of the story - about two people who really like one another but whom circumstances have driven apart - survives intact beneath all the sarcasm and frat humor.

The same holds true for the film's other main couple, Alison's sister Debbie and her exasperated husband Pete (Paul Rudd), though they get much less screen time together. Rudd's been funny in several films at this point (who could forget his turn as horndog sportscaster Brian Fantana in Anchorman?), but I think this may be his best performance, particularly in the way the film keeps you guessing about his true nature. And as I said, Mann is really really good here. She has a scene at a club with a bouncer (played by the guy who plays Daryl from "The Office") that's easily one of the film's highlights. Interestingly, Apatow cast Catherine Keener in his last film totally against type, as a sweet woman who slowly nudges an aging virgin into sexual maturity. Here, he has written a part that's exactly playing to Keener's strengths - hostile and razor-sharp, but nonplussed about it - and given it to a different actress.

Beyond the leads, Knocked Up is teeming to the point of overflow with small, funny performances. Apatow has a kind of sixth sense for the cameo or small role - in the movie just long enough to make an impression, no more. Steve Carrell has one great scene, current Saturday Night Live regular Kristen Wiig has a very funny, very strange role as an E! executive and Harold Ramis gets one of the film's sweetest scenes as Ben's serene father.

Plus, all of Ben's friends are wonderful little characters, kind of serving as the movie's hazy Chorus. They're around for all of the main action, but just off to the side, representing all that Ben was and could be again without the proper motivation. They're all veterans of previous Apatow projects - Jason Segal and Martin Starr from "Freaks and Geeks," Jay Baruchel from "Undeclared" and Jonah Hill, who had one of those awesome tiny roles in 40 Year Old Virgin as the guy who wanted to buy the shoes in the "We Sell It For You On eBay" Store - which may explain why their dynamic feels so lived-in and realistic.