Nacho Libre

In moving beyond the low-low-budget Sundance find Napoleon Dynamite and into the world of mainstream Hollywood filmmaking, Jared Hess and his co-writer and wife Jerusha have made a few fatal errors. In retrospect, it's clear that the success of Dynamite stems from its essentially sweet nature and its modest ambition. A movie that defines low-key, idiosyncratic comedy, Dynamite presents a world of freaky weirods that oddly endearing. I felt like leaving the theater after 5 minutes when I first saw it, but then when it was over, I kind of wanted to see it again right away.

Perhaps Hess' childhood friend Jon Heder, who played Napoleon, was really the great comedian behind that particular nation-wide phenomenon, or maybe Hess just can't connect emotionally to the world of Mexican wrestling as he did with a coming-of-age story set in Idaho. Whatever the reason, Nacho Libre is a completely embarrassing mess, the kind of movie people will recall in 10 years when asked if they've ever walked out in the middle of a movie.

"I don't think so, I usually stick around to...Wait, we did leave Nacho Libre. After about 3 scenes. I think we snuck into something else that was playing...Maybe that animated one with the escaped animals...No, the other one...No, the other one..."



Some critics have called Nacho a "children's film." This is being kind. It's not that anything in the movie has been specifically designed with children in mind. (In fact, it's general air of crude misanthropy and reliance on violence for humor is exactly the tone you would want to avoid in a kid's flick). It's just that these kinds of doody and fat jokes only work on 8 year olds. And that's only if you get them all cranked up on Pixy Sticks and extra-large Dr. Peppers.

The entire movie is like a bad, offensive "Saturday Night Live" skit gone horribly awry. Fat, stupid Ignacio (Jack Black) works as the cook in the Mexican monastery/orphangage where he grew up. After a beautiful nun (Ana de la Reguera) comes to stay at the orphanage, Ignacio dreams of impressing her by becoming a Luchador, one of the masked wrestlers who make all the money and get all the girls. To realize his ambitions, he joins forces with a feral idiot (Hector Jimenez) who eats tortilla chips off the ground. Eventualy, he will become the famed Nacho Libre and take on the most famous and evil Luchador in all of Mexico, Ramses (Cesar Gonzalez).
The script, written by the Hesses and Mike White, methodically avoids the charm and carefully-observed humanity of Napoleon Dynamite. Those characters were quirky, but it was clear from the start that they were also meant to be lovable. Napoleon is a liar and an oddball and a whiner, but we also see that he's reacting to a lifetime of frustration and loneliness, and we root for him to come out of his shell and begin to relate to those around him.

No one in Nacho Libre is in the least bit likable. Some characters, like Nacho himself, are downright unpleasant, but most have no personalities at all. Many of them are fat and exist only to be the subject of cruel, bullying humor. (For no good reason, a fat woman is required to crawl through a amkeshift hole in the wall in order to chase a man. Get it? She's horny because no one will touch her because she's so disgustingly fat!)

The fat jokes are constant and eventually hugely unpleasant, particularly when the target is the overweight orphan Chancho (Darius Rose). What kind of a man would make an entire film poking repeated fun at a fat kid? I'm certain there are circumstances in which a shot of a fat child would be funny, but to constantly resort back to such a cutting, mean-spirited ploy for cheap laughs is not only bad filmmaking but kind of makes Jared Hess a bad person.

Where did this judgemental side come from? It's nowhere evident in Napoleon Dynamite, an extremely laid-back and accepting kind of movie. That's a film speaking to the pleasure of discovering the eccentric personalities of your friends and family, of accepting people for who they are and loving the peculiarities that make us human. Napoleon and Kip spar in the beginning, only to come to a mutual fraternal understanding by the end. Napoleon even finds a way to make the school appreciate him, to rise above his classmates abuse and earn their respect through his courageous sacrifice on behalf of a friend.

In Nacho Libre, everyone's poor and fat and gross and ugly and stupid and pompous and full of shit. No one is redeemable. An entire sub-plot concerns Nacho's attempts to forcibly convert his atheist trainer and friend. In fact, an argument in favor of faith is just one of the actually interesting themes Hess brings up only to dismiss in favor of more fat jokes. A case could even be made that the film is racist, depicting Mexico as a large dirt-ridden impoverished slum in which everyone is a sweaty rube with horrible hygeine. If Hess has any real love of the country of Mexico, the Mexican people or Lucha Libre, it's not evident from this film, which comes only to mock these individuals and their culture.

During the film's many unfunny and tedious wrestling matches, there are repeated shots of a grizzled old man with a crazy eye by the side of the ring. Why do we return to him again and again? He says nothing at all except occasionally yelping "Nacho!" He serves no function for the story. He's not involved in any running gags or large ensemble jokes. He's just funny looking. Jared Hess thinks old Mexicans look amusing and he likes showing them in close-ups to get laughs from superior-feeling whites.

I hated Nacho Libre and I don't even really want to talk about it any more. It's unpleasant and dumb and not funny at all and it's sheer desperation made me feel uncomfortabler. Jack Black's a gifted comedian, and he tries his best to lighten things up by flopping around all over the place and singing his patented wacky songs, but I'm not sure 100 Peter Sellers clones would be up to the job of salvaging this wanktastrophe. Is this film worse than Date Movie? That will be one of the chief questions to consider when compiling my Bottom 10 of 2006.

If This Votes A-Rockin', Don't Bother Knockin'

If you've noticed a downturn in the number of political posts on Crushed by Inertia, you really should get a life beyond reading this blog. But nonetheless, you'd be more or less accurate. I find that I have fewer and fewer sarcastic things to say about the news as it gets increasingly dire and hallucinatory. I know that our political system has always, at least during my lifetime, been teetering on the cusp of total insanity. But I think some time during the last 3.5 years, we went completely over the cliff, shattering every last bone in our bodies on the rocky crags of Lovecraftian horror-madness below.

It started slowly. Weird fringe beliefs - apocalyptic fantasies, long-simmering regional prejudices, eliminationism - were suddenly finding their way into major newspapers and cable TV shows. There was a time, 9 years ago, when Ann Coulter was fired from MSNBC for slandering veterans:

Kurtz also told Extra! that MSNBC had confirmed that Coulter was let go after making such a comment to a disabled Vietnam veteran.

In the MSNBC NewsChat segment, in which Coulter debated Bobby Muller, president of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, her exact words to the paralyzed veteran were: "No wonder you guys lost."

She was interrupting Muller's point about the role that landmines played in the Vietnam War: "In 90 percent of cases that U.S. soldiers got blown up--Ann, are you listening?--they were our own mines."

Today, she says far more offensive things than that, specifically denying the heroic veteran status of guys like John Murtha and Max Cleland and John Kerry, as well as, disgustingly, denying the authenticity of the grief of 9/11 widows.

And not only does she appear on MSNBC, she's Jay Leno's invited guest on The Tonight Show! On regular ol' NBC. Why on Earth would NBC want to have Coulter on a nightly entertainment show? She's about as entertaining as...well, as Jay Leno. I guess they've got me there.

(I, for one, was disappointed that Coulter's fellow guest, George Carlin, didn't say anything to her about her hateful brand of rhetoric. She's exactly the kind of brain-dead sycophantic TV talking head that Carlin attacks frequently in his stand-up. I think the George Carlin of 20 years ago would have said something...But I guess he felt it wasn't an appropriate venue. Maybe she'll come on his next HBO special.)

You see my point. The whole nature of public debate in America has changed. The tenor of the entire thing. When I did team debate in high school, the issues taken up were controversial "public issues of the day." And it was always important stuff - immigration, universal health care, China's Favored Nation Status. But we never debated the sort of issues that come up today. It seemed like, certain things were just understood, certain bedrock American principles respected, and then lets argue about the smaller things about which the Constitution is not fully clear. Like abortion and euthanasia and welfare.

There are some Bush II-era disturbances that have seemingly upset this delicate balance on a more permanent level. That just denigrate our national conversation, remove a lot of the dignity this country has managed to somehow preserve after decades of inept, vicious and greedy foreign policy. Here's a short list:

(1) The "unitary executive" theory: I can't think of a larger threat to American democracy than the President claiming to be above the law and the seat of all governmental power. The President can't create the law single-handedly and can't operate above the law. I shouldn't have to tell anyone that this was the entire point of the country in the first place. It's almost as if no one remembers their Montesquieu!

But it's not only that Bush as King violates everything American about America. It's that he's using this power to undermine the very fabric of our society, and no one seems able to stop him even though the people kind of know what's going on by now.

How, you may ask, is he undermining the very fabric of our society? Well, let me just skip ahead to:

(2) Torture: See, this shouldn't even be on the table. We've kind of agreed, all of us civilized people, that torture is bad. In fact, however hypocritically, the United States has historically spoken out against torture on an international level. We kind of scold other countries, like China and Russia, who still brutalize their own citizenry. The fact that we're now openly torturing people, and a lot of Americans are speaking up in favor of the practice (or at least willingly turning a blind eye), means we've already lost this war. I don't care how many "al-Qaida leaders" you guys want to blow up, the fact that the whole world's seen us dragging around terrified bloody Muslim guys means we lose. We're officially worse than the 9/11 hijackers to the rest of the world. That was one day five years ago. We've been doing this horrible shit ever since.

I think torture's one of those things that makes good people turn away from being politically aware altogether. If our government can just decide to start torturing people, and there's nothing we can do, why bother voting or seeking out real news and information? Doesn't actively participating in the political process make you complicit in some way in these crimes?

But torture isn't the thing that keeps most people away from the polls. I know, that's still laziness and a generally disaffected attitude. Also, this next item:

(3) Rigged elections: If you can't convince people that their vote will be counted fairly, they won't bother to vote. I mean, this makes me want to give up, too. From Skippy the Bush Kangaroo:

the brad blog keeps digging up more and more people who are questioning the results of california 50 race, where francine busby lost by a mere 4000 votes to bilbray. the fact that most of the diebold election machines were taken home and stored in cars and garages overnight before the election might have something to do with people's questions.

Did you just read that? The voting machines were stored in individual's cars and garages? Can you fucking imagine?

I work in a store. I've never once taken the safe home with me for the night, for storage purposes. Do any of you who work with sensitive materials during the day bring them with you at night in your freakin' car? Any engineers taking your work home with you? Hey, it's only top-secret plans for a new radar system. What could go wrong? Just throw it anywhere, I'll deal with it tomorrow!

As Bill Paxton would say, "Game over, man! Game over!" One the elections are just assumed to be fraudulent, you've got yourself a despotic regime, my friend. Have fun with that. If anyone wants me, I'll be sneaking across the Mexican border, to a nation where at least the drug laws make sense.

President Bush Sinks a Bit Deeper Into Senility

Is this guy a world leader or a cartoon character? I mean, in this exchange with the Los Angeles Times' Peter Wallsten, we're talking Clouseau-like levels of buffoonery here...

Bush: You gonna ask your question with shades on?
Wallsten: Yes...
Bush: But there's no sun out here.
Wallsten: It depends on your perspective.
Bush: Touché.

Wallsten is blind. Oops.

Neil Young: Heart of Gold

A few years back, I saw Neil Young and Crazy Horse play at the Greek Theater here in Los Angeles. I didn't even realize, to be honest, that Neil had a new album coming out. I just saw that they were coming through town and figured that my brother, father and I would probably enjoy going to check them out, as we're all fans of their 70's brand of jammy blues rock as featured on albums like Everybody Knows This is Nowhere.

It turns out, Neil did have a new project - the themed Greendale LP - and proceeded to perform the album in its entirety, along with live actors and elaborate sets, as the main set of the concert. My reaction was mixed. Though I think the Greendale songs are overall pretty good, and the band sounds great, and seeing a theme album acted out by Russ Tamblyn (seriously!) and others was kind of a trip...I would have still rather seen a greater variety of Neil Young songs from random albums throughout his extensive and impressive career.

He did do a really ripping encore that included most of the "live" half of the Rust Never Sleeps album, so I didn't go home disappointed. This is just how Neil operates. He assembles a group of musicians he knows, records an album and then takes that same band around the country to play the songs for live audiences. It seems to have worked well enough so far.

Weakened with age and health concerns (he had recently been diagnosed with an operable brain aneurysm), Neil gathered together some of his favorite long-time collaborators to record the wistful, occasionally maudlin country album, Prairie Wind. Jonathan Demme's superior concert film, Neil Young: Heart of Gold, combines footage shot over two nights at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, with Neil and his fellow Prairie Wind musicians showcasing the album's songs and dipping into his back catalog. The DVD came out yesterday and is mandatory viewing for any fans of Neil Young or country-rock in general.



Demme previously shot the Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense, quite possibly my favorite concert film of all time. (Although that's tough to say, because Monterey Pop and The Last Waltz and Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars all make a strong case.) As in Stop Making Sense, Demme sacrifices some measure of energy and immediacy to give the viewer a real sense of the meaning and significance of this performance. In his previous film, the idea wasn't so much to make you feel as if you too were in the crowd watching Dave Byrne in his oversized suit as it was to capture the esesence of this band, to document why, at that moment, it was worthwhile to pay attention to "Girlfriend is Better" instead of some other, more radio-friendly number.

Similarly, I wouldn't neccessarily call Heart of Gold a "best seat in the house" kind of experience. It's more focused on Neil Young's personal journey, taking some time off from music before realizing, perhaps to his surprise, that he had something more to say. Demme attempts to use these two concerts as a description of the process of aging, how you hang on to the fascinations of your youth but continually adapt them to fit the preson you've become.

For Neil himself, it seems like the idea of collaborating with his old friends was more enticing than the actual act of making music. He's understandably excited to be back on stage at the venue that hosts the Grand Ole Opry, playing Hank Williams old guitar, with Emmy Lou Harris and his wife Pegi and guys like Grant Boatwright and Spooner Oldham and Larry Cragg, the man with perhaps the most appropriate last name of all time. Sometimes, the chummy good vibes are a bit too much, in fact. I could have done without a few of the mid-song smile exchanges between Neil and wife Pegi, who provides background vocals. I mean, come on, are you guys making a concert film or a wedding video here?

The music itself is pleasant enough, if a bit folksy for my tastes. Prairie Wind the album had some highlights, and they stand up really well in the live format, particularly the dreamily optimistic "It's a Dream." Of course, it's unintentionally ironic that, just as this performance appears on DVD, showing Neil's most laid-back, romantic side, a new album has just been released showcasing his tendency towards bitter, angry hard-rock. So it's nice, while watching something like the treacly empty-nest lament "Here for You," to remember that this guy can still write a blazing arena anthem called "Let's Impeach the President."

After the Prairie Wind segment, the band performs a number of Neil's classic countrified selections, including "Old King" and "Harvest Moon." Though I've grown to appreciate Neil Young over the years, I never liked him as a child when my Dad would put on his music. "Old King" is the one song that I still can't really stand, lo these many years later. It's just so lame and, I'm sorry, really artificial. I usually find Neil's attempts to adopt the cowboy persona kind of charming, but that song just ain't workin' fer me. Plus, the plinkity-plink guitar refrain annoys the crap out of me. For all you songwriters out there, "Old King" has one valuable lesson:

Never begin a song with the line: "I had a dog and his name was King." It makes it sound like your song was written as a 5th grade in-class assignment.

Neil also solos on "Needle and the Damage Done," which is a great song but kind of clashes with the honeyed sentimentality of the rest of the setlist. Regardless, with the surround sound bumping in my living room, it all sounded great.

But what impressed me just as much as the musicianship was the filmmaking. It's just shot and edited so seamlessly and so handsomely realized, full of Demme's patented tight close-ups and strange, akimbo angles. You're forced to pay attention to the melancholy behind the songs rather than focusing on Young's occasionally Hallmark-esque lyricism.

I just have one final concern...What the hell is going on with Emmylou Harris? A few years ago, at like the Johnny Cash funeral and those performances with Elvis Costello, she looked fine. But did she have some bad plastic work done in the interim? Or was she in some kind of car accident? She looks scary. (That's her on Neil's right. To his left is his wife, Pegi Young.)



And here's a better look at her, close-up, just so you all get what I'm talking about here...



When this woman, who appeared to be aging quite gracefully, become The Joker? And why wasn't I informed?

The Pit of Ultimate Darkness

A few years ago, I got into a heated argument about the comedian Ray Romano. Not about whether or not he's funny. I think we all can agree that he's not. It was about whether or not it would suck to be Ray Romano. In all honesty, I feel some measure of pity for that guy.

Sure, you have a lot of money, but the rich guy thing gets old pretty quickly. I think. I mean, I wouldn't know from experience...If I have enough money left over at the end of the week to get the double Fatburger instead of just the regular, it's a delightful surprise. Seriously, it's an ugly scene in my checking account. My current financial picture looks like it was painted by Francis Bacon.

But just from observations I've made working and living in some high-class communities, most rich people aren't any more satisfied with life than their middle-to-lower class counterparts. My theory is that, basically, once you have enough money to live with a reasonable level of comfort - in a decent neighborhood without having to work two jobs and never having to seriously worry about putting food on the table - you've topped out at money-related happiness. The extra millions on top tend you make you spoiled, paranoid, miserly and ultimately empty inside unless you're particularly good at remaining level-headed and grounded.

So I doubt Ray Romano's many many millions of dollars give him much comfort. And sure, he's got a lot of fans. But the guy's basically a joke. No one will take him seriously at anything he wants to do ever again. No one wants to see him act any more, that's for certain. He and Kevin James have a movie debuting on DVD this month in which they play traveling meat salesmen. It could be the next Welcome to Mooseport! And Ray was once kind of cool, so it's not like he's just some yokel satisfied with getting famous off a mediocre comedy product. He was on "Dr. Katz" so many times, he was practically a cast member, and some of his old HBO half-hours or whatever were actually kind of funny.

It's a sad story...He still goes around doing stand-up comedy tours, but let's face it, his popularity has already peaked. If I were Ray Romano, I'd sit around and feel sorry for myself. Most people never get a chance to realize their dreams. They get to have that illusion, that unrealized fantasy of fame and wealth and noteriety. But Ray's already lived the dream, he's literally done everything a young comic would ever want to do...and now he's got memories and a nice house and all the time in the world. Yikes.

Like a failed "American Idol" contestant. Most shitty singers go through their whole lives thinking that they didn't make it because they never got that break. It just didn't happen for them. But Ryan Starr doesn't get to feel that way. Sure, she got a few other reality show gigs out of it, a bit part in a Skinemax movie or whatever. She's probably richer than she otherwise would have been. But she knows that she's not famous any more because Americans just don't like her. We had a chance, got to know her personality a bit and then mutually decided that she wasn't good enough to be notable. Yet we continue to obsess over Nicole Ritchie! It can't be a good feeling.

Maybe it's a pessimistic world view, but for a lot of ambitious people, I get the odd feeling that success is a losing proposition. Ray Romano won the game of life, he hit the Hollywood jackpot. Long-running syndicated massively popular sitcom. Seriously, if you ever get a chance to get into some gig on a long-running sitcom...just know the money's really great in that field.

But when I see Ray Romano on television, I don't think, "Oh, there's that delightful Ray Romano. What an inspiration to us all!" I think, "Ugh, this guy sucks, change the channel."

Which brings us to Karl Rove.



Having once again managed to dodge the painful and very public comeuppance that's been chasing him for years, Karl Rove will not suffer legal consequences for the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. How disappointing. I was hoping for swift, severe justice for Mr. Rove, possibly involving a lengthy stay at Guantanamo and definitely involving the participation of TV's "Cops" reality program. (Or, if they are unavailable, the cast and crew of "Reno 911.")

How does he do it? Karl's not just one of the most evil men in America, but unlike his fellow villains, he's defiantly unsubtle about being evil. He kind of reminds me of Kevin McDonald's old character, Sir Simon Milligan, from the old "Kids in the Hall" show, who hosted a talk show devoted to villainy along with his manservant, Hecubus. So, in this scenario, Karl Rove would be Sir Simon and George Bush would be Hecubus, played on TV by the hilarious Dave Foley.



ROVE: Oh, manservant Bush?
BUSH: Yes, master.
ROVE: How many of our secret illegally-detained political prisoners did you kill today?
BUSH: None, master.
ROVE: None! You call yourself an evil manservant?
BUSH: I made sure that three of them killed themselves!
ROVE: Eeeeeeeeeeevil!

Rove just represents a slightly different example of the same Romano phenomenon. Here's a guy who always wanted to be a political operative. And not only did he succeed in rising to the top of the Republican Party, but he has ushered in a new era in American politics based on his own crooked, irredeemable design. Could even the self-aggrandizing Mr. Rove how much success he'd have impugning the characters of political opponents and rigging elections?

So here he is, working with perhaps the most powerful and corrupt political administration in American history, getting off scott-free after publicly smearing a diplomat by leaking secret information about his wife's activities with the CIA...and yet he's a laughing stock, a figure of public disdain and ridicule, and one of the most hated men in America.

Maybe Karl doesn't care about being despised as long as he never has to go to jail, but I sure wouldn't want to swtich places with Karl Rove. Not only because I wouldn't be able to live with myself, knowing that I was directly responsible for the numerous daily crimes of the Bush administration all over the world. But because the combination of extreme fame and a dastardly reputation wouldn't be a lot of fun if you ever wanted to go outside or do anything.

See what I mean? Today he's the big winner, but in another way, every day he wakes up and still has to be Karl Rove. Poor bastard.

The Clod Squad

The only explanation I can come up with for this photo is that Orlando Bloom has slipped Claire Danes a mickey.



Maybe she just had to get really tanked to go out spend an entire evening with Orlando Bloom. I needed to do some heavy drinking just to get through Elizabethtown, and that's only two hours long. An entire social affair must feel like a cryogenic hypersleep voyate to Jupiter.

Why's he looking at the photographer like he's never seen a camera before, by the way? Perhaps he's just wondering how he's going to steal the film, so no one will have evidence that he's drugging popular starlets before taking them home and giving them a right proper rogering?

Running Scared

The quote on the front of the Running Scared DVD reads "It makes Kill Bill look like Sesame Street." As Quentin Tarantino himself might say, that's a bold statement. It's also fairly inaccurate, in that Running Scared and Kill Bill share only the most superficial of qualities - a delight in flamboyant violence and a densely-packed international cast of thugs who cuss like sailors. Wayne Kramer's crime thriller far more closely resembles another Tarantino-scripted genre piece, the Tony Scott-directed True Romance.

In fact, the Scott comparison, overall, is far more accurate. Kramer cribs many of his favored camera tricks and set-ups directly from Scott, particularly the recent T.S. epics Man on Fire and Domino. Add in a touch of Guy Ritchie's gangster riffs and a dash of David Fincher's steely, fluid eye candy and you've good a decent sense for the visuals in Kramer's feature. Like all those movies, Running Scared is a frenetic, adrenaline-fueled journey through a seedy, corrupt circle of sociopathic criminals occupying a crude, nihilistic universe of endless cruelty.

Though it's never as sly or fun as Lock, Stock, I will say that the movie's far more enjoyable than Scott's recent work (or, really, anything he's done since True Romance.) Kramer's aesthetic sense may not extend far beyond what other "hip" directors have already done, but his writing is sharp, occasionally very funny and best of all unexpected. The story of low-level mobster Joey Gazelle (Paul Walker) and his overnight search for a hot pistol always manages to find a new spin on this old-fashioned material. The result, at 121 minutes, gets a bit tiring by the end, but always remained watchable and even a bit disarming. An overall more enjoyable experience than I expected by a good measure.



I'll dance around the plot a bit, because most of the fun of the film is slowly realizing just how far Kramer's going to push these dire, grisly scenarios. What begins as a straight-forward chase movie - with Joey's own compatriots, a crooked cop (Chazz Palminteri) and the Russian Mafia all gunning for him after he loses a vital piece of evidence - develops into a crushing, dark night of the soul that comes to seem inescapable.

After a dizzying opening scene, in which Joey and his partners are held up by corrupt cops in ski masks, Kramer takes his time in developing his haunted, miserable characters. Joey and his beautiful but hard wife Teresa (Vera Farmiga) are raising their son Nick (Alex Neuberger) in a rough neighborhood. Nick's best friend, Oleg (Cameron Bright, who plays the kid in Birth and X-Men: The Last Stand and every other goddamn movie that doesn't already feature Dakota Fanning) lives right next door with his former Moscow prostitute mother (Ivana Milicevic) and vile, abusive stepfather (Karel Roden).

Roden's character exudes pure malice and tips you off early what kind of scenarios will follow. A maniac who worships John Wayne in between beating his wife and burning his stepson, he will eventually be transformed into a sympathetic character. (You may remember Milicevic, by the way, from her appearance on "Seinfeld," in which she played the beautiful wife of the pro shop clerk who sold Jerry an expensive racket and then turned out to stink at tennis. I kept thinking about this during the movie, which was kind of distracting, but not really Milicevic or Kramer's fault).

Complications arise after Oleg shoots his stepfather with Joey's gun, the same pistol used to murder police officers earlier that day. Oleg takes off, and of course Joey has to find him before anyone else, so he can reclaim the evidence and make this whole unfortunate situation disappear. Otherwise, it's lights out for our anti-hero.

Kramer rides this simple premise for all its worth. I was reminded in an odd way of Harold and Kumar go to White Castle, a movie that developed a charming comic universe out of the most straight-forward of scenarios. Running Scared is certainly not the same heedless, silly good time kind of movie, but it does build up an impressive number of strange, beguiling sequences.

A few elements I particularly appreciated:

- Kramer actually gives Joey's wife Teresa some stuff to do. For a while, the movie actually uses them as dual protagonists, cutting back and forth as Joey goes after the missing gun and Teresa hunts down the missing boy. Teresa's adventure in particular kind of steals the whole film, and would work just as well divorced from the larger story as a short film. Farmiga's really terrific in these scenes, turning this woman whom we've previously seen only as a dutiful wife and mother into a ferocious vigilante. She'll next appear in Martin Scorsese's The Departed, so apparently she's already on to bigger and better things.

- None of the characters fall back on obvious cliches. Even the Italian mobsters, possibly the most difficult kinds of characters to provide distinctive personalities at this point, feel a bit more natural and complete than usual. When in doubt, Krmaer just makes someone stand out by being brutally insane, which tends to keep you on your toes.

- Appropriately for its subject matter, the movie is violent. And not just in a "lots of people get shot" way. In a Verhoeven-esque splatterhouse kind of way. Many of the film's primary relationships revolve purely around violence - a guy will walk up to another guy and just start beating the shit out of him. There's so many gushing arterial sprays, the fake blood guy deserves billing above the title. Fortunately, the violent scenes are creative, with Kramer attempting to seek out new ways to crush skulls that haven't already appeared in 100 similar movies. Whether or not he fully succeeds is open to debate, but you've got to give it up to the guy for trying.

I fear we're reaching the breaking point for this whole branch of the crime genre. These quirky hard-edged darkly comic ensemble gangster stories just don't have the shock value or spark of originality they did when Pulp Fiction was playing Cannes. To get the same effect as the 90's incarnations, Kramer has to go way way way over the top. As I said, I appreciate the effort, and he comes up with a film that's really watchable and sporadically really enjoyable. It certainly puts the tired Layer Cake to shame. And I didn't even hate Paul Walker as much as usual, so he's doing something right. But it will take a lot more than some snazzy scene transitions and shotgun blasts to the chest to revitalize this particular strain of movies. Sidelong Tarantino references may not be totally out of line, but I'm not exactly ready to declare this guy next-in-line for the King Geek title just yet.

You Know Who Else is a Black Star?

In the post immediately below this one, I really let Mos Def have it for his irritating performance in 16 Blocks. As I say in that column, Mos' turn as Eddie Bunker clashes with the rest of the movie. He feels ridiculous, over-the-top and out of place.

After tonight, I may be ready completely reverse my opinion. Now, what you're about to read is a theory, only a theory. But if I'm correct, 16 Blocks might just represent the greatest subversive counter-cultural attack by a mainstream artist in at least a decade. If not more.

But now I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's go back in time a little bit to the year 1935. Much like in the Hollywood of today, studios banked on popular film franchises to draw audiences to theaters. One such series featured Swedish actor Warner Oland as Chinese detective Charlie Chan, operating out of Honolulu, Hawaii.

Though based entirely around oversized "exotic Chinaman" tropes, wearing silly slant-eye make-up and dispensing faux-Oriental proverbs constantly, Oland's Chan isn't as offensive as you might expect. Chan is always seen as intelligent and capable, and operates on the same level as the aristocratic white characters. This doesn't forgive the lapses into racism, of course, but it does keep the film a bit more palattable and less pernicious than some other examples of 1930's cinematic stereotyping.

Far more unsettling is the performance of Stepin Fetchit as "Snowshoes," an African-American servant who has migrated to Egypt. Yikes. The character fulfills just about every venemous, hateful prejudice held by whites against blacks throughout American history. He's lazy. He's extremely stupid. He's cowardly. He's horny and out of control around women. He's amotivational and inclined to drink and use drugs to excess. And he speaks in a long, slow drawl slurring together all his words, which he explains away as a Mississippi accent but which sounds more like the early stages of a stroke.



There are two ways, I suppose, to see Fetchit's performance in this film, which is almost exactly like his supporting turns in all his 20's and 30's projects. One would be to view the performance directly, calling it as it appears. Fetchit made a lot of money and won his fame by portraying the worst lies about his people, depicting himself as a child-like stooge, helpless without his white masters. (White characters speak to Snowshoes as one would a dog. "Go give this to Miss Arnold! Get out of here, you!")

But there have been other arguments made about Fetchit's turns in these films. Rather than playing a bug-eyed simpleton like other black caricatures in films at the time (as in Raoul Wash's dreadful High Sierra), Fetchit's characters exist in a world of their own. Is this really just slothful idiocy, or is there an intelligence working behind the scenes, using the appearance of idiocy to foil white oppressors? Some have suggested that Fetchit's antics were designed to make him less servile, not more. Whereas a typical submissive black character, an "Uncle Tom," would just do what he's told all the time, a somewhat more wily black character, a "Coon," might feign ignorance bordering on retardation as a way of avoiding the worst kinds of humiliation.

Of course, this is not my theory. It's even included with the guy's IMDB biography, and Kevin Smith played with the notion with his character of Hooper X in Chasing Amy (who, you'll recall, has written a comic book called White Hating Coon.) Plenty hae argued that Stepin Fetchit (real name: Theodore Perry) was quietly subversive and ahead of his time.

But I think I'm the first one to say the same about Mos Def in 16 Blocks. It took watching Charlie Chan in Egypt for me to realize how much of his performance Mos based around Stepin Fetchit. There's the slurred, difficult to understand manner of speech coupled with an inane chattiness. The wide-eyed naivete coupled with cowardice (at least, in comparison to all the macho white men in the movie). The big goofy grin, the child-like sense of hopefulness, the gangly physical comedy. It's all there.

And then I thought about the actual role Eddie Bunker plays within the larger film. He's a prop, a pawn in the midst of an important battle between white men. David Morse leads a team of crooked cops from which Bruce Willis is a defector, and these two fight it out with the actual criminal in question, Mos Def, just kind of awkwardly hanging around. Several scenes feature Willis actually lugging Mos Def along through the movie as one would a duffel bag.

And though he's not a racist caricature in the 1930's style, he does fit the stereotypical contemporary profile of the "American black guy." Eddie's an ex-con, a product of the foster care system with a sister whom he's never met.

Is Mos Def commenting on this role he's been given or just falling into an unfortuante pattern? Is he really so sly, to play the part as a commentary on the shitty, stereotypical supporting roles forced on black actors? Something to consider...We're talking about an intelligent, historically conscious, literate guy here. A guy who's almost assuredly aware of Stepin Fetchict films and has probably watched a few.

Consider, also, this coincidence. Both 16 Blocks and the Charlie Chan Box Set come out on DVD this Tuesday. AND THAT'S NOT ALL Mos Def also appears in the fascinating and exceptionally entertaining documentary, Dave Chappelle's Block Party which also comes to DVD this week! Dante, are you trying to tell us something?

Aside from the scheduling, what makes Block Party particularly interesting are its insights into race and fame, the responsibilities and considerations and decisions forced on black men when they become rich celebrities.

In following around Dave Chappelle in the summer of 2005 (a few months before he wigged out, cancelled his massively popular Comedy Central show and fled the country), Michel Gondry captured not only a fun musical event, but a portrait of a man navigating the awkward and unfamiliar terrain of sudden fame and outsized expectations. He seems to sense that he'll be judged by how he reacts to new found significance and wants to be remembered as something besides the guy who said "I'm Rick James, bitch."

What exactly he wants to be remembered for is uncertain, as the only thing Block Party seems to set out to do is entertain, maybe expose some new people to some great music. At one point, Mos Def brings out Fred Hampton Jr. to discuss the legacy of the Black Panthers that feels odd and out of place in such a feel-good atmosphere.

(As well, I'm not certain as to the effectiveness of shouting the names of random political prisoners you'd like to see released. How about making an impassioned plea on behalf of one prisoner in particular? In the few minutes Hampton Jr. and Mos Def spend chanting, they could be speaking about a prisoner who's been wrongfully jailed. If the movie's a big hit, then potentially millions of people will hear your case!)

Taking what turned out to be an indefinite break from the pressures of creating hilarious television, Dave Chappelle organized a free surprise concert in Brooklyn featuring an all-star line-up of popular, thinking man's hip-hop. In addition to chart-topper Kanye West and a reunion of 90's mainstays The Fugees, the show features Common, Dead Prez, a Black Star reunion with Mos Def and Talib Kweli, Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, Big Daddy Kane and The Roots.

(The Roots are always welcome at these sorts of shows, as far as I'm concerned, because live rap songs just sound better with a band.)

In one scene, Dave invites an older white woman from his neighborhood in Ohio to the concert, even offering to pay her way to New York. She says she doesn't like rap music. "But I like you!" she enthuses. Another lady who works behind the cash register at Dave's local convenience store confesses that she's always wanted to talk with him but has been too shy. Despite his best efforts, only a smattering of white people wind up at the concert, as Dave notes in a comedy bit before adding that there are even fewer Mexicans.

There's a lot of comedy, which is hit-and-miss. A long sequence finds Dave and Mos Def practicing a vaudevillian-style routine with Dave telling extremely old jokes. Some are funny, most aren't, but the whole thing just kind of goes on and on. I was expecting a concert film, but this is really more of a documentary. I would have liked a lot more footage of some of the sets, particularly Common, who is hardly even seen in the film, and Dead Prez, who seemed very interesting and whom I know nothing about. Even with the extended music option on the DVD, you only get to see a few complete songs out of the entire show.

I bring up Block Party at the end of this thing about Mos Def both because he's in the film and because race is constantly on Dave Chappelle's mind throughout the film. It's not neccessarily that he resents his fame or his new fans, but it does seem like he's tired of being shoehorned into one specific joke or show or idea. There's an undercurrent of fear, possibly that he'll be silenced or softened by Hollywood, that he'll lose himself to his Comic Persona. In one sequence, he gets really riled up talking about Dead Prez, and how their lyrics are too controversial and blunt to get on the radio.

"People don't want to hear that the White House is the crack house," he rants to the camera.

So, to offset the encroachment of big business into his comedy, he runs in the opposite direction. Not in terms of the size of the event, perhaps, as this project is not nearly small-time. There are some heavy hitters in attendance, and of course the whole thing is being filmed for a big-screen documentary film by the (white, French) guy who made Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with Jim Carrey. But it's certainly a personal project, something more about Dave Chappelle and his specific interests and opinions than a half-hour of sketch comedy.

By now, we know that this sort of side project wasn't enough to keep Chappelle satisfied, and he eventually left his post as America's Favorite Funnyman to go to South Africa and convert to some weird religion or something. As of right now, he's back and still doing stand-up comedy, as I understand, so hopefully he's found a way to keep the balance.

And now, we bring it back to 16 Blocks. What if Eddie Bunker is Mos Def's version of the Block Party? (Yes, I know he was at the actual block party, but bear with me here...) What if he's blowing off steam, satisfying himself with taking this nothing stupid role for a paycheck by letting anyone who's paying attention know that it's a ridiculous joke. He's stranded in this brain-dead cop thriller playing the Stepin Fetchit role, the defiant "coon" who refuses to play by the idiot rules of the white guy's genre.

I have no idea, I'd like to repeat, if that's really what he's doing. I'd certainly invite anyone else's thoughts on the subject.

16 Blocks

Before I can even go on with a proper review of this film, we need to talk about Mos Def's voice. I've heard the man speak and he actually has a very pleasant, level voice. I mean, he's an MC, right? He's got to be able to express himself fluidly and clearly, correct?

What this means is that, at some point during the pre-production process on 16 Blocks, Mos and director Richard Donner made the intentional decision for him to sound like a Muppet. And not even a featured Muppet player. Eddie Bunker, Mos Def's character, doesn't have the distinctive nasally whine of Gonzo or the raspy baritone of Rolph. He sounds like one of the members of the Muppet Show band who they only give two lines per season.

I thought that his character was supposed to be retarded for the first 15 minutes or so of the movie. That's how out of place and bizarre Mos Def's choices in this role. 16 Blocks isn't really all that awful as an overall effort, but this irritating, aggressively awful lead performance keeps distracting from the film's modest charms, making it seem worse than it really is. This is unfortunate, because I've enjoyed Mos Def in The Woodsman and The Italian Job, and otherwise Donner has turned in a passable, if generic, cop thriller.



Aside from MD, I would only take issue with Richard Wenk's script, which only makes sense occasionally if you apply a certain kind of cartoon logic. Tired, alcoholic NYPD officer Jack Mosley (Bruce Willis) is on his way home after a long night when his superior asks him to run one quick errand before clocking out. He must pick up some prisoner from the local jail and transport him 16 blocks away to the Court House to meet with a Grand Jury by 10.

Anyone who has ever seen a movie before can probably guess what happens. It turns out, prisoner Eddie Bunker (Mr. Mos) is planning to testify against a number of extremely crooked cops, including Jack's partner, Frank Nugent (David Morse). These police officers will, naturally, stop at nothing to keep Jack and Eddie from completing their appointed rounds. And so the chase, as they say, is on. (I don't know what Frank's so worried about...If he goes to prison, I'm sure his brother Ted can devise some survivalist scheme involving a crossbow and an extraordinarily loud guitar solo to break him out.)

Consider this...Bruce Willis previously played the hero to David Morse's supervillain. Can you name the movie?








It was 12 Monkeys, in which Morse memorably donned a red wig to play the lab assistant plotting the End Times. Mathematically, this means their next film must include the number 20 in the title. Unless I've forgotten to carry a zero or something.

Anyway, 16 Blocks offers no real surprises and no real excitement, but it's pretty well-shot and features some predictably solid work from Willis and Morse. There's a lot of ungainly dialogue to get through about honor and justice and duty, the kinds of scenes these guys have been doing in middle-of-the-road cop thrillers from something like 20 years now. But you never get the sense that these two guys are bored or that they're on auto-pilot. It's not award-worthy work, just professionalism.

The screenplay has some lapses, admittedly. It's doubtful that Willis' character would have been given this assignment in the first place considering what we learn by the final scenes. The film's understanding of the nature of court proceedings and grand juries seemed a bit shaky. Once the chase segues awkwardly into an armed stand-off, complete with a bus full of hostages, all common sense has been pitched out the window. If catching a middle-aged drunk and a strange guy loudly spouting gibberish in the middle of New York at midday is this difficult for these cops, can you imagine how much trouble they have with real crime? No wonder they have to cheat and plan evidence in order to put guys away.

The sad irony is that Eddie was almost assuredly the most interesting character on the page. An irascible former thief who dreams of making birthday cakes for a living, I'd wager the fast-talking, street-wise and anxiety-prone goofball brought a lot of color and New York atmosphere to a screenplay in need of some individuality. But instead of coming up with an organic, natural persona for Eddie, Mos Def does the gruff voice he used to do for laughs on "The Chappelle Show" and talks really fast. So you can't understand him at all, and when you can, he's babbling about sheet cake recipies at a fantastic clip. And no one wants to watch that, trust me.

I honestly can't believe Richard Donner let him do this for the entire movie. He's in just about every scene and he's virtually incomprehensible. Really, it goes beyond the mere fact that you can't hear or discern what he's saying. The entire character is a dumb caricature, the sort of thing that might be funny for a minute or two in a comedy sketch. If Eddie's going to be the comic relief for an entire film, shouldn't there be a little more going on with him?

Intelligent Re-design!

It's too bad the theories of evolution and global warming are fraudulent junk science, because they would really help to explain this:

Longer growing seasons have caused genetic changes in a wide range of animals in the past few decades, biologists announced today.

As the spring reproductive season arrives earlier and lasts longer in northern latitudes, a fact owing to climate change, animals that can adapt their schedules stand a better chance of seeing their genetic information passed on to later generations, leading to a change in gene frequencies within populations.

Wow, it's almost like nature is "selecting" certain species of animals to survive by allowing them to live longer and breed, based on their ability to adapt to their habitat and ecological system. I wonder if anybody's thought to concoct a theory around this remarkable observation...

Studies have shown that global warming is acting fastest at the most northern latitudes, resulting in longer growing seasons. The change is also alleviating winter cold stress without imposing summer heat stress.

"Spring is coming earlier and fall is coming later," said study co-author Christina Holzapfel, a biologist at the University of Oregon. "The conditions that you experience in the North are becoming way more like you'd expect them in the South."

Of course, this study, detailed in the June 9th issue of Science Magazine, is only giving you one perspective on this story. There are plenty of other perfectly reasonable explanations for these phenomenon coming from the Intelligent Design crowd.

For example, did you stop to consider that God wants us to enjoy more tropical fruits, so he's heating up vast zones of the Earth to grow more kiwis, pineapples and juicy mangoes and killing off animals who would raid these crops? Or perhaps that the widespread marrying of gayers has caused the entire planet to tip slightly Hell-ward over the past few decades, resulting in an overall increase in heat and forcing God to personally recalibrate the animal population? I'd like to hear one of those brainy egghead University of Bore-egon scientists poke a hole in that theory.

Many animals time their migrations and reproductive habits so they arrive in an area at the same time food is most abundant, but some food items sprout in response to warm temperatures and are becoming available earlier in the season. In some cases, animals are showing up as the food source is starting to fade, leading to a decrease in fitness and survival of offspring.

"Take great tits for example," explains study co-author William Bradshaw, also of the University of Oregon.

With pleasure!

These European birds...

Oh, yeah, the birds. Never mind.

These European birds rely on day length to decide when to lay eggs so plenty of caterpillars will be available to feed their hatchlings.

But the caterpillars respond to warming temperatures and are arriving earlier in the season. Since the birds are still following daylight cues, there are fewer caterpillars left to feed hungry chicks when the eggs hatch, leading to lower fitness and survival rates.

So, what you guys are saying is that...the early bird catches the worm. Aesop saw all this shit coming, man! That guy was like the Nostradamus of animal-themed morality tales.

While shrinking glaciers and animals struggling to adapt to a changing global climate might grab all the headlines, pathogens that require a longer growing season could emerge, Holzapfel said. The shift could also have large economic impact, particularly related to agriculture.

Are shrinking glaciers and animals struggling to adapt grabbing "all the headlines"? I guess you could say that Al Gore's movie recently grabbed some headlines, but most of those were obsessed with explaining to everyone why we still hate Al Gore. In fact, I haven't seen many headlines at all about global warming's effect on animals, unless you consider being slaughtered and packed into a RibWich a "struggle to adapt."

Casualties of War

Brian de Palma's 1989 film, based on an actual incident in which American soldiers raped and murdered a Vietnamese girl, could have been directed this year. It relates so well to the atrocity at Haditha and other horrific actions by American troops in Iraq, the only conclusion to be drawn is that some members of an occupying force will, by their very nature, eventually regress into a collective of monsters capable of any malicious act of cruelty.

Though it's always individuals who commit heinous acts such as those depicted in Casualties of War, it is not a case of unique, singular psychopaths managing to enter the Armed Forces undetected. As De Palma shrewdly depicts in the film, these war crimes are an expected and tolerated side-effect of long-term military actions, particularly those undertaken against a canny, guerilla army like the Viet Cong or the Iraqi Insurgents. Higher-ranking officials and civilian leadership have a set policy of looking the other way when it comes to these kinds of human rights violations.

James Wolcott discusses here some of the factors that play into this unfortunate scenario. In the simplest possible terms, a powerful occupying army will eventually be viewed as monstrous by the local population, and so their resulting behavior will increasingly play into this image. They will become the blood-thirsty butchers that they were always expected to be.

Rhetorically, it puts those of us on the homefront in a difficult position. It gives me no pleasure to come down on American soldiers, young men and women who, for the most part, did not enlist in our Armed Forces out of some great desire to murder foreigners or occupy sovereign nations. Yet there is no real excuse for murdering children en masse whilst one is representing America overseas. The only solution, I feel, is to punish all of those involved in such incidents. The soldiers who have actually done the raping and/or killing as well as the military leadership that permitted, encouraged and promoted such activities.



In De Palma's film, the disgraceful crimes undertaken by a small cadre of Vietnam soldiers occur for two reasons. The enemy has been sufficiently dehumanized for these troops that raping a Vietnamese woman doesn't strike them as cruel or inhuman. Additionally, a lack of accountability or moral leadership has led to a pack mentality, in which everyone defers at all times to the most aggressive member among them.

Sgt. Tony Meserve (Sean Penn), in other words, knows that he can act however he pleases in the field with complete impunity. He's much more valuable to his commanding officers than any number of Vietnamese whom he might abuse, so his cocky attitude and naked hostility are accepted as the cost of doing business. And because of his confidence, his attitude, and the fact that he's surrounded by yes men, no one wants to violate his orders or fall from his good graces.

Yet that's exactly what PFC Erickson (Michael J. Fox) must do when Meserve goes into a Vietnamese village and kidnaps a young girl (Thuy Thu Le). It's unfair, in a way, that Erickson's put in this position. Rarely does doing the right thing carry with it the immediate risk of being murdered by your comrades-in-arms. To me, this is the real message of De Palma's film - in a way, bad things happen so often because it's exceptionally difficult to do the right thing. That's why war is such an unfortunate state of affairs. It's horrible enough when carried out properly, but by its very nature, the conduct eventually degenerates into the worst mankind has to offer.

I'm writing this on a day when there has actually been a positive move forrward in the Iraq struggle. One of the early leaders of the insurgency, the rotten bastard Al-Zarqawi, was killed in a bombing raid. It's something of a hollow victory on many levels - al-Qaida isn't so much a top-down hierarchy kind of organization, where killing one leader will really matter, and Zarqawi was hardly an original member, having only joined the cause after the 9/11 attacks. But still...credit where it's due. (Although I should add that it's not very classy of us to trot the dead guy's picture around as if he was a prize-winning flounder or something.) I just hope this isn't a motivational kind of win, the sort of shallow uptick that will cause the country to re-enthuse about our chances of "winning."

In life, as in Casualties of War, the conflict, on an individual level, isn't so much about wins or losses as it is survival for its own sake. In a guerilla war, one side always tries to seduce the other into battles, generally with little luck. The soldiers wander about in the Vietnamese jungle only to be set upon by well-hidden snipers. They enter villages and are ambused. (One such incident early on, in which a beloved fellow soldier is gunned down and killed in a village, sparks the animosity of Meserve in the film). There aren't battles that can end triumphantly, but only a grinding, endless war of attrition.

So it's hard to get too excited about the news that we've taken down another "al-Qaida leader." It seems like we do that every week and the news itself never gets any better.

Anyway, as for De Palma's film, I can't recommend it highly enough. It's troubling to watch, not outrageous fun like most of the guy's movies. But instead a relaly insightful, deeply-felt story about not just the traditional "horrors of war" but also the evil that war brings out of otherwise normal men. Plus, it features great work from John C. Reilly (in his first big film performance) and Ving Rhames, a great score by Ennio Morricone and terrific jungle cinematography by Stephen Burum that looks incredibly rich and vibrant on the new Director's Cut DVD.

More Radiohead Blogging

I don't know if you're all as into Radiohead as me. It's quite possible. They have a lot of fans. That's why tickets to their shows sell out so quickly, sometimes before they're even available for sale.

If you're not, feel free to go read and then vote on the Braffy nominations. (Next round of noms coming soon! Including the vote for Worst Robot Artificially Alive!)

If you are, then it's an extremely busy and exciting time. Not only are the band touring presently, a tour I will actually get to go see later on this month, but there are not one but two albums coming from key band members in the coming months.



First up will be Thom Yorke's solo effort, The Eraser, which he, like, totally promises doesn't signal the impending break-up of the band as solo efforts by frontmen so often do. It's already available online in its entirety, either via illegal peer-to-peer downloading or semi-legit mp3 blog dissemination.

I've been listening to little else for the past few days, and it's really terrific, if somewhat unsurprising, stuff. Yorke doesn't really switch genres or tinker with his sound. He basically just simplifies and pares down what you'd get if Radiohead played these same songs. Having said that, the album does capture the woozy, acid-laced vibe of some of the better tracks of "Amnesiac" and really grew on me after a few listens. The spartan anthem "Black Swan" will provide back-up atmosphere to the closing credits of Richard LInklater's animated Phillip K. Dick adaptation, A Scanner Darkly. Just so you know...

After Yorke's album debuts this summer, the new Radiohead LP will hopefully hit in the fall. Most of those songs can be found in live versions around the Web as well. My favorite thus far is "Bodysnatchers," which you can find here, along with all the other new songs, via A Reminder. Apparently, their setlist this tour will be about 1/3 new songs. Hells yes. I can't freakin' wait.

BRAFFY NOMINATION: WORST WRITER ALIVE

Not a lot of actual voting in the last Braffy nomination post. A lot of comments, sure, but most people are replying to Steve's assertion that I be nominated in the category of Ugliest, Fattest Jew. I gave it some thought, and I can't help but agree that I should at least be considered in the category. So, as a little side category, I give you the nominations for the Braffy Award for the Ugliest, Fattest Jew:

Henry Kissinger



Yes, he's ugly and fat, but ask yourself this...Is Henry Kissinger Jewish? Oh, wait, he totally is. So, yeah, he should probably win.

Jon Lovitz



People used to tell me I looked like Jon Lovitz. It's the sort of observation you should probably keep to yourself. That's not complimentary. There's an easy test for whether the person you're about to tell they resemble a celebrity will appreciate the comparison. If you think that celebrity would be likely to appear on the cover of a fashion magazine, that's a nice thing to say. If you think the celebrity in question would be likely to appear in candid shots taken in the grotto of the Playboy Mansion, just don't bother following up on that particular thought. Why not use the previous weekend's box office totals as a conversational starter instead?

Ariel Sharon



What, just because he's in poor health means I can't pick on him for being fat and ugly? Nuts to that. Just take a look at that specimen and tell me he doesn't belong in this illustrious company.

Me



Believe it or not, the beard is slimming. I keep meaning to lose some weight, but for some stupid reason, my body only seems to respond to exercize and proper diet. I would try the program that worked for Anna Nicole Smith, but I'm afraid that all that freebasing might hurt my ability to blog cogently.

Now that we've all had some fun with my chronic obesity, let's move on to the actual task at hand, shall we? As always, vote for both UFJ and Worst Writer Alive in the comments section below.

Ann Coulter

Really, Ann might not be eligible in this category. I'm not sure if constantly spewing senseless invective actually counts as "writing." I occasionally see her credited in print as an "author," which is kind of like calling Jason Voorhees a "surgeon." It's like, yes, she actually types up her columns, which are then read by people, but that's letting her by on a technicality.



Ann's composed too much hateful rhetoric to summarize in one single nomination post. I could write several books, if debunking a known crackpot were worth the effort. Also, if I didn't have to go work in a video store every day. Here are a few of her more recent post-nasal drips of wisdom:

Even proud American corporations find their names being turned into curse words by liberals, such as “Halliburton,” which is currently losing money in Iraq in order to supply food to our troops – you know, the same troops liberals pretend to love (but don’t lose money feeding).

Awww...Those poor guys...Maybe I'll send them a check to help tide them over.

Liberal doctrines are less scientifically provable than the story of Noah’s ark, but their belief system is taught as fact in government schools, while the Biblical belief system is banned from government schools by law.

I'll give you a moment to wrap your head around this one...How can something be less scientifically provable than a made-up story with no scientific evidence in support of a single one of its contentions? In essence, how can something be less provable than an outright fabrication? Or is she finally admitting that she just makes up ways to attempt to prove things that are blatantly untrue? (I mean, even Christians in the Dark Ages accepted that much of the Bible wasn't literally true! And they thought whipping themselves with Cat o' Nine Tails was a way to get closer to God!)

On behalf of red state America, let me be the first to say: "Screw you, Hollywood."

So all those people in Texas and Utah and Alabama who saw X-Men: The Last Stand just drove in for the day from Maine, huh? It must be, because Ann Coulter speaks for all of Red State America every time she opens her gaping maw.

If you want to find the cool, anti-establishment rebels who don't answer to "The Man" on college campuses today, you have to go to a meeting of the College Republicans.

Wooo! Maybe Bill Maher's right about her. Maybe she is really hilarious. Cause that's...

Oh, she's serious...Moving on...

Tom Clancy



It's not that I think Clancy's such a shitty writer, although I'll admit to not particularly getting off on long, loving, detailed descriptions of rockets and missiles and guns. I greatly dislike him for two reasons that have little to do with the actual quality of his writing.

(1) He puts his name on all kinds of crap that he doesn't write or really have anything to do with. Tom Clancy's Shadow-Ops Zone: The Glaciation Trilogy: Commanders-in-Chief for the XBox, or some such thing. Or even novels! There are all these books called Tom Clancy's Executive Order Files or whatever, and then you look under the title to find the name of some random schmo. If it was written by Jim NoName, then it isn't really "Tom Clancy's Executive Order Files." It's "Some Asshole's Executive Order Files." But they probably wouldn't carry a book with that title at Barnes & Noble.

(2) His largest contribution to pop culture has been the ongoing glorification and fetishization of war and the American war machine. How many men (and, let's face it, that's Clancy's prime audience) have been seduced into thinking of war as a desirable state of affairs because of Clancy's military-themed thrillers. They preach not only the notion that protecting America's vaguely-defined "national security" is worth any cost in human life, but the idea that war is not just neccessary but exciting. Even glamorous. Those video games bearing his name are little more than Military Indoctrination Programs. Play them for long enough, and you'll start to think sneaking up behind guys in hallways and slitting their throats with a razor-sharp hunting knife sounds doable.

It's just more of this us-or-them, might-makes-right propaganda that's needed by our leadership to convince everyone to back foreign conflicts.

"Hey, do you guys want to go risk your lives to kill brown people senselessly?"
"Um, not really."
"Didn't you read Patriot Games? Terrorists want to remove your daughter's spleen!"
"Wasn't that about Irish terrorists?"
"Sir, why do you hate America?"

Kate O'Beirne



Kate's the particularly virulent GOP mouthpiece who went on TV earlier this year and criticized the speakers at Coretta Scott King's funeral for insulting her beloved President. She also wrote a book earlier this year about how all feminists are horrible and ugly and mean, especially Hillary Clinton, who is probably one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse but Kate can't decide which one.

Despite seeing her show up on TV all the time to comment on politics, I have never heard Kate utter a single original insight. Her punditry has a less contemporary spin on American politics than Alexander de Tocqueville's early work.

It's just all this "feminists never got a date to prom so now they hate all men" stuff. I just wish she could be honest and admit that social and sexual freedom are just too terrifying for her, openly stating that she needs a man areound to dictate proper behavior. Then we could finally get her the help she so desperately needs.

Dan Brown

Failed songwriter and self-help author Dan Brown made a killing off a dumb book you may have heard about called The Da Vinci Code. It's an egregiously poor piece of fiction with a great hook, so of course it has sold more copies than the Kinko's Corporation.



He kind of looks like an ugly Kirk Douglas. It must be the chin...

Plenty of novels are poorly written. The Left Behind series for example. And A Million Little Pieces. Not to mention Dianetics. But Da Vinci Code has set off this whole obnoxious trend now of pop Biblical historiography and faux art appreciation, where everything's about "unlocking the buried secrets of the past." As if World History is a Tomb Raider game.

Americans know so little about history, even their own history, and now that the subject's finally getting some mainstream attention, the central preoccupation is sexy Jesus-related gossip. You can't even watch The History Channel any more without seeing idiocy about symbols and codes buried deep within Botticellis and Caravaggios. Isn't it enough that the paintings are beautiful masterpieces? Do they have to be Sudoku now as well? I never thought I'd say this, but those guys should probably focus a bit more on the Third Reich.

You want to know a very closely-kept, conspiratorial secret about the New Testament? Lean in closer...IT'S ALL HORSESHIT WRITTEN LONG AFTER JESUS WAS ALREADY DEAD BY PEOPLE WHO DIDN'T HAVE ACCESS TO ANY AUTHENTIC INFORMATION OR PRIMARY SOURCES! Ditto the Old Testament! You can tell because it's full of ludicrous nonsense! Did I just blow your mind?

John Stossel

And now, my impression of everything John Stossel has ever written or said, ever:



I was wondering just what the deal was with this whole Halliburton Corporation. Are they really as evil as everyone says? I think anything a company does in order to earn the largest possible profits is inherently good, so I did a little research. And what I found out might shock you.

"Halliburton isn't really evil. We're all about helping people," said Halliburton Public Relations director Dave Orson. "Why would people assume that just because we're intimately and directly connected to a Vice-President who keeps starting expensive wars that provide us with expensive contracts, there must be something untoward going on?"

Could it be that Halliburton is really doing great things in Iraq and elsewhere? I went over to Iraq and took a look for myself, and what I found might startle you to the point that you defecate in your pants.

What I saw were big buildings with the name Halliburton on them and trucks bearing the Halliburton logo. I talked to several people who were working with large pieces of equipment, and they told me Halliburton had hired them to go to Iraq and do things. I even saw some Iraqis around who hadn't been shot or blown up yet. This doesn't sound like such an evil conglomerate to me.

But it doesn't stop there. I also discovered that, out of all the high-ranking executives from Halliburton, none had been arrested in the past six months for fraud, money-laundering or racketeering charges. What a collection of criminal war profiteers, huh?

"Halliburton is the best company in the world, and you are getting very sleepy," Orson explained to me while waving his pocketwatch in my face. "Your eyelids are getting heavy. When you awake, you will want to give Halliburton unfettered access to the U.S. Treasury and pass a Constitutional Amendment providing them with the right to declare war on a sovereign nation without Congressional approval. When I snap my fingers, you will complete the interview."

The answer is clear. Halliburton isn't a collective of thieves and greedy fatcats bilking the citizenry of the United States out of billions of dollars under the guise of the War on Terror. You're thinking of George Soros and Hillary Clinton. Now let's never speak of this company again and get back to attacking the real enemies of America - Islamofascinazis and liberals.

Rick Warren




One of America's most popular, influential and creepy preachers, Warren made a name for himself with the publication of The Purpose-Driven Life, a book that tells you how to live in a Rick Warren-approved fashion.

Here is how the book opens, with comma errors left in place:

IT ALL STARTS WITH GOD

It's not about you.

The purpose of your life is far greater than your own personal fulfillment, your peace of mind, or even your happiness. It's far greater than your family, your career, or even your wildest dreams and ambitions.

Wow, that sucks. I'm not supposed to try and find fulfillment and happiness? Thomas Jefferson, you are a liar!

If you want to know why you were placed on this planet, you must begin with God. You were born by his purpose and for his purpose.

...

Contrary to what many popular books, movies, and seminars tell you, you won't discover your life's meaning by looking within yourself. You've probably tried that already.

Hey, yeah, just because I haven't yet figured out man's place within the infinite, I should just shrug and give up and leave it all to the invisible guy in the sky. Thanks, Rick Warren! You're fatalistic worldview doesn't at all conflict with the reality of the modern world in which I live!

If I handed you an invention you had never seen before, you woulnd't know its purpose and the invention itself wouldn't be able to tell you either.

This is just a bad analogy. There are plenty of inventions the use of which could be discerned from a superficial examination. What about a straw. You don't think, if you were presented with a straw, you could determine that its useful for sucking up things on your own? Do you read the instructions every time you get a new device or piece of equipment? Doesn't this argument ignore the entire concept of trial and error, upon which all human knowledge is actually based?

But Warren's philosophy is far more sinister than just dumb analogies and bad teleological arguments. It is dangerous for two reasons:

(1) It is a cult mentality

Warren argues that the only happiness is to be found through performing God's will.

You exist only because God wills that you exist. You were made by God and for God - and until you understand that, life will never make sense. It is only in God that we discover our origin, our identity, our meaning, our purpose, our significance, and our destiny.

Okay, so once we decide that it's all about God's will, how do we know what God wants from us? Why, we listen to Rick Warren, of course! And this is how one goes about founding a global ministry with hundreds of thousands of members. By lying about "God's will" and then telling people how to behave in between hitting them up for money.

(2) It is a hopeless, anti-human philosophy

Think about it...To Rick Warren, you're a useless piece of shit. A slave. You have no purpose of your own. No meaning. You exist only to serve an invisible deity who created you because he was lonely and needed some other beings to boss around and dominate. Who wants to live in that kind of world, an eternal servant to a cold and uncaring master?

Listen to how this guy talks:

You were made for God, not vice versa, and life is about letting God use you for his purposes, not your using him for your own purposes.

Life is futile. Only God matters, and since we can't know anything about God, in a sense nothing matters. At least, nothing in the here and now on Earth matters. It's nihilism disguised as Christianity.

I'll take atheism any day over this bizarre form of self-loathing. Sure, a world without God can seem somewhat empty and futile, but I think atheists can come to understand that life has whatever meaning you invest in it. If you think helping others is a way to give your life some meaning, then you do that. If it's using your imagination and creativity that makes you useful and provides you with an outlet, hey, go for it. But, I mean, how are you supposed to wake up every day ready to once again submit to the will of a silent, possibly fictional Guy who lives in Outer Space? I wouldn't survive a week.

Okay, those are your nominees. Write-in suggestions are welcome.

[UPDATE: I don't want to unduly influence the voting, but I think you all should be aware of this quote from Ann Coulter's latest book, Godless, cited by Dave Neiwart at Orcinus, in the interest of fairness. She's discussing 9/11 widows:

These self-obsessed women seem genuinely unaware that 9/11 was an attack on our nation and acted as if the terrorist attack only happened to them. They believe the entire country was required to marinate in their exquisite personal agony. Apparently, denouncing Bush was part of the closure process. These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by griefparrazies. I have never seen people enjoying their husband's death so much.

Beat that, O'Beirne! Your move!]

Underworld: Evolution

Not having seen the first Underworld movie, I was highly confused throughout Underworld: Evolution. Confused my not be strong enough a word. Baffled. Perplexed. Flummoxed. Yes, I know, I'm coming in halfway through the story, but I thought these were films about a war between werewolves and vampires. I didn't think it would be like walking in to the last ten minutes of The Big Sleep and trying to reverse engineer all the double-crosses. It's like watching LA Confidential dubbed into Portuguese on a crappy bootleg while nursing a bad hangover and suffering from advanced glaucoma. You'd have better luck unraveling the JFK assassination than clearly explaining to me the myriad motivations behind the action of Underworld: Evolution.

To be perfectly honest, I didn't care at all that I couldn't figure anything out. Director Len Wiseman may not be asked to helm the next Curious George movie or anything, but he's one of the few contemporary Hollywood directors who knows how to shoot an action sequence, using computer-generated effects to enhance the on-screen action rather than dominate every frame.

Quite possibly the year's most aesthetically pleasing special effects extravaganza thus far, Underworld: Evolution on the whole gets a whole lot more right than wrong. I'll probably go back and rewatch the original film, just to gain some perspective, but I can't imagine I'd have enjoyed myself all that much more, even if I knew why Vampire A hated Werewolf B.



Some early exposition fills us in on just about all the reliable and easily understandable information we're going to get. Many years ago (I forget how long), a king had two sons, both of whom were mutated after encounters with deranged, monstrous wildlife. (What a coincidence!) Marcus (Tony Curran) turns into the proto-vampire after an unfortunate run-in with a bat while William (Brian Steele) becomes infected with lycanthropy after being bitten by a wolf. These two really ought to initiate the Buddy System when traveling at night.

Marcus turned most of the royal entourage into vampires, who quickly went about the business to locking William away. Werewolves, you see, are too out of control and dangerous, whereas vampires are far more respectable, cultivated blood-suckers.

Cut to the present day, when Marcus returns after a long hibernation and sets about attempting to free his crazed, homicidal, wolfen brother. The only ones who can stop him, apparently, are the former werewolf-hunter Seline (Kate Beckinsale, who is Mrs. Len Wiseman, by the by) and her companion, a half-vampire half-werewolf named Michael (Scott Speedman). I don't know why they're the only ones who can stop him. I also don't know why they're on the run from the rest of the Vampire Nation. Also, I don't understand what they're talking about...ever. The movie may as well have been a silent film, really.

Fortunately, the visuals more than make up for the fact that this universe has more backstory than "Eastenders." The make-up and design of the Marcus character, a humanoid bat with massive wings that he uses as weapons, struck me as particularly impressive. Generally, in a film like this, we'd get brief, dark glimpses of the monster during the climax, and that's it. In Underworld: Evolution, however, Marcus is a major character who seamlessly blends into the reality of the film. (When he's finally revealed, the William werewolf looks similarly detailed and menacing.)

When you consider that a human baddie is played by British legend Derek Jacobi, I think it's safe to say that the villains are far more interesting than the heroes. As George Carlin might phrase it, watching Scott Speedman act is like watching flies fuck. The guy's like Human Ambien. That we're supposed to find the Dude from "Felicity" physically imposing only makes the miscasting more painful. Now, I understand that it may not be fair to judge the casting of Speedman on this film, as he's held over from the first movie, but Wiseman never manages to convince us that this guy's capable of verbally assaulting a huge bat monster, let alone supplying a physical beatdown.

Beckinsale does what's required in this sort of role - looking very hot in skintight leather - and not much else. But she's supposed to be a vampire. They're kind of distant and cold and stoic, probably because they are technically dead. So I'll allow it.

That kind of sums up my feeling about the entire film. Sure, it's extremely silly and overblown. Yes, a lot of the visual style seems directly lifed from the Matrix and Blade movies. But it's a whole lot of fun, shot with a cool blue glaze that gives everything an otherworldly (underworldly?) property, and the whole thing's filled wall-to-wall with gory mayhem. To ask anything more from a movie about w ar between werewolves and vampires is to be a curmudgeon.

Some More YouTube Videos

These are too good not to post.

First up, a British filmed version of Alice in Wonderland from 1903. It's only about 8 minutes long, so there's really no excuse for not giving it a look. The film's only surviving negative is badly damaged, as you'd probably expect from such an early movie, but what's there to be seen is fascinating.

At this point, there weren't really a lot of narrative guildelines to follow when making a fictional film. (Most movies at this point were novelty items based solely around capturing movement, like images of trains going into tunnels or blossoming flowers). So the movie kind of jumps around the story heedlessly, not so much trying to tell the audience the tale of how Alice falls down a rabbit hole and enters Wonderland as it is trying to illustrate the story viewers already have in their heads. On this video, there's an audio commentary by film historian Simon Brown giving you some background on the production, which he says was the longest British film then produced.



Just an incredible piece of film history. The Internet is goddamn amazing.

I hesitate to put up this next one, because the Jeffrey Lyons commentary is so horrifyingly annoying. You're trying to watch rare footage and the guy's babbling on about Spanish ranch owners he has known.

In 1934, apparently, a young Orson Welles and an acquaintance named William Vance directed a brief, extremely surreal silent film called Hearts of Age. Astonishingly, the thing ahs sruvived and someone has put it up on YouTube. It stars Welles as Death and his first wife as an old lady. Some of his favored techniques are already visible in this footage, including his taste for extreme close-ups at odd angles.

Finally, here's an older, sadder, fatter Orson drunkenly screwing up a wine commercial shoot with regrettably hilarious results. Yes, it's tragic what became of the man, but I'd like to think he'd be able to look back on this period of his life with a sense of humor.

Here I'm Allowed Everything All the Time

It's possible to get very lost in the YouTube archives. I went over there to watch a few of these hilarious 80's videos but just starting doing random searches and poking around, and lost a few hours in the process.

In my excitement about getting to go see Radiohead in Berkeley in a few weeks, I checked out a few of YouTube's wide selection of the band's videos and live performances. Here are a few highlights:



A live performance, somewhere or another, of one of my favorite songs off of the "OK Computer" album, "Exit Music (For a Film)." I think of it as being one of the quieter song sfrom that record, but when they played it at Coachella, I was taken by the power of the song's conclusion. It's a very tight song, really builds in intensity over a relatively short period of time.



I didn't even know they made a video for "Idioteque." This is why MTV needs to show more videos and less shows focusing on the unfunny antics of one Nicholas Cannon. Thom Yorke looks downright creepy in this video, all gnashing, crooked teeth and uneven haircut. He looks kind of like an unfortunately hairy, starving infant.



This is a particularly kickass version of "Go To Sleep" from the 2003 Glastonbury Festival.



Okay, fine, so that last one is Men Without Hats and not Radiohead. Sue me.

I love how, at the beginning of the "Safety Dance" video, the man of normal height, presumably one of the Men Without Hats, and the midget are just walking around aimlessly in a field. Then he spots a village and points it out to his diminutive friend.

What were they going to do if they hadn't spotted thevillage? Are they just a wandering normal/midget team traveling across the land teaching people how to make a peculiar curving motion with their forearms?