I'm Not There

There was a time when fixating on the various shifts in Dylan's personality, persona, appearance and idiosyncrasies was the exclusive province of the obsessed Super-Fan. Most people just enjoyed the guy's music. It was just the overweight, bearded guys in their basements cataloging obscure bootlegged recordings and pouring over back issues of fan newsletters with names like "My Back Pages."

But now, in 2007, these details have been examined so many times over in so many different media, I feel like everyone who's ever even heard "Highway 61 Revisited" could recite Dylan's entire biography. Born in a small mining town, boasting an early affinity for country music and the blues, he worshiped Woody Guthrie (who's famous now almost exclusively as Bob Dylan's inspiration, almost like a Folk John the Baptist to his Rock Jesus). He finds his way to the Greenwich Village folk scene, he turns on the folkies and starts playing hard-hitting rock music, he gets into a motorcycle crash, he converts to Christianity. And so forth. If you really want to hear this story, if all of this is new to you, I highly recommend you watch Martin Scorsese's brilliant documentary No Direction Home. That covers all the bases nicely.

That's not to say that there's no meaning left to squeeze from the life and work of Bob Dylan, or that Todd Haynes shouldn't bother to make a film about one of the most fascinating and iconic people alive today. It's just that his movie wants to present us with Bob Dylan the Unknowable Enigma, the Man of 100,000 Identities. And I just can't shake the feeling that I actually understand Dylan fairly well at this point. This is a mystery that has been probed with such depth and so few real tangible answers, calling the film I'm Not There is an understatement. No, Seriously, Dudes...Stop Looking...I'm Totally Not Fucking There...Got Any More Pills? strikes me as more appropriate.



There's a lot of cool scenes, good performances and interesting ideas for a movie. So many, I'm tempted not to knock Haynes' effort. If nothing else, he's produced a clever film that will spark some provocative post-theatrical conversations over coffees. I just think he sets up a central conceit to which he can't live up.

By showing us various lives based (sometimes loosely) on aspects of Dylan's personality, Haynes seems to promise that he will deliver some fresh insight into the man or his work, some perspective that we have lacked until now, viewing him as only one man. Even taking a more abstract approach - assuming that the film is more about the nature of identity itself rather than the nature of Bob Dylan's identity - doesn't make Haynes' film any more satisfying or successful. Then it just becomes a series of vignettes about some emotionally distant, surly individuals who can't seem to fit into their own lives, albeit a well-shot collection.

I've read descriptions of the films that flatly state all these characters are meant to be "Bob Dylan," which is completely inaccurate. Rather than cast several different actors as Dylan, or even sides of Dylan, as the advance word on the film indicated, Haynes has created a group of six characters who all stand in for various Dylan fixations or creations. See that word? "Creations"? That means, none of these people are actually meant to be him, which is why none of them are named "Bob Dylan." They're just angles on him, quick peeks behind the mask, because the whole reason Dylan had to invent these characters was to avoid telling us what's really going on with him.

Only two of the six characters even act out recreations of Dylan's real biography. Christian Bale plays folk singer Jack Randall, whose Dylanesque rise to fame in Greenwich Village's Cafe Wha? is retold in mockumentary fashion reminiscent of Scorsese's film from last year. And Cate Blanchett, in the film's best Dylan impression and performance, portrays burned out rock star Jude Quinn, whose misadventures in America and England are clearly modeled on Dylan's tumultuous journey from folk hero to rock star.

I think Haynes would have been much better off forgetting the meta-Dylan stuff and making a film starring Blanchett as Jude Quinn. These sequences, shot in a mesmerizing, stark black-and-white, still contain large doses of the referential post-modern silliness that mars so much of Haynes' movie, but they're also the most humane. Blanchett, perhaps by being a female being a male or perhaps because she's just a terrific actress, strongly suggests a twisted, paranoia-fueled terror behind Dylan's caustic mid-'60s attitude. Quinn's cruelty towards a socialite based on Edie Sedgwick (Michelle Williams) obviously comes from an overwhelming and amphetamine-addled frailty. (This scene, in which video snippets of Quinn in a variety of Dylan-esque poses flit by on screens in the background, turns genuinely nauseating for both Quinn and the audience, a testament to Edward Lachman's audacious and masterful cinematography.

When Haynes slows down and starts making a film about how it feels to be Bob Dylan (or like Bob Dylan), rather than how it feels to think about Bob Dylan, his film becomes much more accessible. I already know how it feels to think about Bob Dylan...



Granted, I only know that because I've thought about Bob Dylan a lot, but I'm Not There has clearly been designed with the studious Bob Dylan fan in mind. How else to explain the plethora of inside-baseball references? Some are obvious, like the recreations of Dylan album covers featuring Christian Bale or the Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid connection. (Getting Kris Kristofferson to serve as narrator was a pretty cool choice, I must say.) But some are just weird and obscure, like dressing the My Morning Jacket guy up in the Rolling Thunder Revue disguise, and others are just plain groan-worthy. (Haynes actually employs the cheesy musical biopic cliche of having characters speak famous lyrics in everyday conversation. I think my friend Raj wanted to leave when someone was accused of acting "just like a woman." WHY DO THAT? IT ALWAYS SUCKS AND IS LAME!)

Beyond just constant, winking allusions to Dylan-ana, Haynes can't resist throwing in a bunch of movie nerd references as well. We get some nods to Fellini that feel kind of out of place and even a sequence featuring The Beatles and riffing on the style of Richard Lester. I understand that Haynes is focusing closely on the way Dylan was reflected through various media (film, television, print, audio recordings) as a way to get insight into the scrutiny he so desperately needed to escape and to explore the way in which layers of meaning were continually added to his work, and then his life. It makes analytical sense, something you could discuss in an undergrad film seminar that could make for a solid 20 page paper. I just didn't find it all that interesting in the movie, and much of it was overstated, obvious or out of place.

The four remaining stories all have some nice moments, but don't really connect as neatly to Bob Dylan or to one another.

Heath Ledger plays Robbie Clark, an actor whose first role was inspired by the Christian Bale character (whom, you'll recall, was very closely modeled on a young Bob Dylan). In addition to the cheesy "just like a woman" line, Ledger also gets to work "I was only a pawn in their game" into the film. Hey, I know that song! Neato! The empty pursuit of fame, which makes so many promises but never delivers, turns Clark bitter and disillusioned. He descends into alcoholism, and turns away from his children and a wife that's clearly based on Dylan's wife Sara (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, who always seems to be on the verge of tears in every scene of every American movie she makes).

The extremely likable young actor Marcus Carl Franklin plays an 11-year-old boy calling himself Woody who rides the rails, running from the law and playing original compositions for his supper. One woman he meets in his travels questions his decision to play throwback old fashioned roots music, insisting that he should write songs about the world around him in the present. This message seems to impact young Woody, but we're not really sure how. Will he henceforth write protest songs in order to give his art meaning? Or would discussing the issues of the day in his music just create an even more grandiose and artful persona behind which he could hide?

In the most baffling section of the film, Richard Gere plays an aged Billy the Kid, one who presumably never died by the hand of Pat Garrett. In this version, old Billy the Kid lives in a fanciful small town until a railroad company, backed by local sheriff Pat Garrett, wants to come in and ruin everything. There are many possible interpretations of this material, but at this point in the film (which is long), I had kind of lost interest in playing connect the dots.

After seeing all this, I'm not sure Dylan really is this great mass of contradictions, this unknowable enigma that can only be accurately portrayed by six actors. Perhaps we're trying to make him into that because the alternative is less inspiring. It's fun to believe in a reclusive genius with a grand vision for life on this planet, who will reveal his True Self to us just after this next album and Greatest Hits Collection. The mundane notion that he might be little more than a self-involved introvert with a history of drug problems who just happens to have an amazing natural talent for songwriting doesn't even occur to us.

But it did occur to me watching Haynes film, because his notion of Dylan as Ramblin' Powers, International Schizophrenic of Mystery feels unearned. We're still not getting genuine insights into this man. We're still only playing around with the same distractions and red herrings he's been showing off for 30 years.

It's Tricky to Rock a Rhyme

Ready for the best viral video since the Dramatic Hamster? I give you the MDA Senior Management Rap!



I just have to say, mad mad props to anyone who can work the phrase "Internal Systems Integration" into a rap song, even if it is part of a celebration of meaningless corporate jargon. I mean, "Internal Systems Integration"? It's ballsy to even give that one a try. Even Del tha Funkee Homosapien would struggle with that one (though I'm sure he'd figure something out...) And he's a trained professional.

zOMG! Teh Watchmen Can Has Setz?

Can't say I'm loving the way the Watchmen adaptation is coming along thus far. It's such a great, great book...and they gave it to the 300 director...with a guy from "Grey's Anatomy" playing The Comedian and Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan. Feels underwhelming, almost by design, for such a huge, epic story that's been so hotly anticipated for so long. (I mean, there was a time Terry fucking Gilliam was considering doing this movie. And they gave it to the guy who directed that overripe homoerotic video game?)

Anyway, consider my expectations slightly raised. This just in from Warner Bros. Watchmen blog.



Put together a couple hundred thousand more frames like that, Zack Snyder, and you might actually make this work.

There's more and larger pictures here.

When I Was 29...It Wasn't a Particularly Good Year...

It wasn't a particularly good year...for city girls...

And, I don't know any more words to that song.

So, today was my 29th birthday, which is one of those birthdays where nothing good happens but a lot of depressing things happen. You get no new privileges or rights at 29. In fact, I don't really get any new rights or privileges ever again, excepting perhaps AARP membership privileges and handicapped parking privileges. But it is a none-too-subtle reminder that I'm fast approaching the age that's pretty much universally regarded as the End of Fun and Youth.

I try not to be too morose about birthdays, of course. There is the whole "free shit" concept that makes the Countdown to Mortality a bit more tolerable. And I haven't reached an age yet where things have become totally bleak. My health hasn't completely faded. I still have SOME hair, though I won't be able to say that for too many more birthdays. Essentially, there's still some promise and hope left for my life. I could still turn things around. This coming one is really the decisive decade. If I haven't made a go of things by 39, I'm in deep deep trouble.

So, facing down an ugly truth like that one, I simply had to indulge in some pointless consumerism. It's the American way, after all. Think about something unpleasant, fill the newly-created emotional void with SHOPPING! (It worked after 9/11. "The terrorists DON'T want you to buy lots of stuff, so you'd better do it or else they win!") So I bought myself an Xbox 360.

I haven't had a video game system since I bought a used PlayStation 2 and wore it out within a few months. (Apparently, even though they function as DVD players, the PS2's weren't really designed for that purpose in mind long-term, which is a pretty massive design flaw if you ask me...) Before that, I'm pretty sure I hadn't had one since the Super Nintendo. I really like video games, but I suck at them, and I found that, over time, my desire to play them for more than 15 minutes at a go has dwindled.

But ever since Mahalo focused seriously on being the best source for video game information on the Intar-Web, I've had a chance to check out a bunch of Xbox games while at work. (I don't actually get to play any games during office hours - that's what Sunday afternoons are for - but they are being played by well-trained, serious professionals at all times, all around me.)

After being vivisected at "Halo 3" a few weekends back by a few fellow guides, I've also had a chance to try out "Assassin's Creed" and "The Simpsons Game." But the real clincher for me was this past weekend, when a small group of enthusiasts gathered at Mahalo HQ to play the new "Rock Band."

Holy crap, this game is AWESOME. I decided to buy the Xbox on the spot. (Yeah, I know it's also on the PS3, but my roommate already has a PS3.) I was actually on vocals for a while, and did surprisingly well. (100% on "Wave of Mutilation," biotches.) Quite possibly the most fun "party" video game ever.

So that was Birthday Weekend 2007. Oh, plus I saw a shitload of movies that I haven't gotten around to reviewing yet, including the postmodern Bob Dylan biopic I'm Not There and the ridiculous, entertaining, ridiculously entertaining Beowulf. Also, sleeping.

Southland Tales

I had a friend in college - well, he's still my friend, but he was also my friend in college - who had the Most Convoluted Idea for a Movie Ever. Even now, I can recall bits and pieces of the premise. An epic adventure about two characters who run away from their homes and drive halfway across the country on a search for some legendary underground drug dealer, encountering all manner of inexplicable goings-on and inscrutable characters along the way. It was, of course, completely unfilmable, a jumble of concepts, inside jokes and metaphysical horseshit that meshed into a coherent story only inside the fevered imagination of a 20-year-old pothead.

How I wish Richard Kelly had the good taste to keep Southland Tales to himself, for use exclusively as stoned late-night conversation fodder! To him, I'm sure this schizophrenic camp fantasy all makes sense. Perhaps its looping, ponderous meta-meta-meta-meta-narrative, based on a needlessly complex dystopian timeline, even has something significant to say about our present American reality to Kelly. To me, it felt like having a stranger take a dump in my brain. These ingredients may have once been nutrients, but they have no business rattling around inside my cerebellum.



Where to begin? I don't mean this review...I mean, writer/director Richard Kelly (who previously made the far-better Donnie Darko) obviously had no idea where to begin Southland Tales. So he opens the film with what feels like an eternity of dry, boring exposition. Justin Timberlake narrates - in a disinterested monotone voice-over, mind you - the future of America, in brief. But, you know, not actually all that brief.

I mean it. Nothing happens for a long time in this movie. We literally get an image of a computer desktop with little windows popping up showing us brief clips from a variety of fictional future events, from a nuclear bomb in Texas to the return of Republican power in the Congress to the massive, permanent extension of invasive government surveillance programs. Kelly knows as well as anyone that an audience will lose interest in this kind of elaborate backstory after a few minutes. This is the cinematic equivalent of the first 100 pages of a Michael Crichton novel, the part where he has to prove he knows how to do research before the dinosaurs come in. There's really no excuse for a professional screenwriter to begin a movie this way.

And it's not as if hearing all this backstory makes the action of the film any clearer or easier to follow. After the set-up finally ends (finally!) and we're introduced to some actual characters, it's still impossible to get any kind of handle on what's happening. Rather than moving from Point A to Point B, Kelly gives us scene after endless, clunky, disconnected scene, proceeding nowhere, crammed to bursting with reams of baroque, inessential details about this imaginary world. But none of these scenes are clever or interesting, and there's certainly nothing that moves the movie forward, the logical progression of events being apparently anathema in the Southland of mid-2008. Southland Tales is so slow, I'd swear the film itself was unspooling at less than 24 frames a second.

Still, despite my own bewildered confusion, I shall do my best to give you some notion of the horrors that await you on your journey to the Center of Richard Kelly's Mind-Grapes.

Famous action movie star Boxer Santaros (The Rock) returns from the desert to Los Angeles with total amnesia, having completed some sort of strange mission but knowing nothing about who he is or where he has been. Somehow (I'm not sure how), he hooks up with ambitious porn queen Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar Prinze). Together, they have written a screenplay called "The Power" that (we're told) accurately foretells the end of the world.

I've never been a huge fan of The Rock as an actor, but Southland Tales is clearly his weakest performance in any film I've seen. He can't seem to decide if the film's meant to be a comedy, so he plays some scenes really broad and wacky and other equally ludicrous scenes in total deadpan. He also has this mannerism of twiddling his fingers (I think it's supposed to indicate nervousness and anxiety?) that gets really overused. It's kind of cute (if a little zany) the first time he uses it, but after the 10th or 12th, you want to smack some sense into the guy. (That's not funny if you do it throughout an entire 2.5 hour film, jackass!)



Santaros apparently doesn't realize that he's really the husband of Madeline Frost (Mandy Moore), daughter of the powerful Senator and Vice-Presidential candidate Bobby Frost (Holmes Osbourne). Senator Robert Frost, by the way, is keen on quoting the famous poet of the same name, particularly the "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood" line that's probably the only Robert Frost quote 99% of Americans know. This imagery, of the two roads and one being untraveled, comes back in excruciatingly on-the-nose, obvious fashion late in the film. It feels more like self-congratulation than anything else, a filmmaker warning you 20 times about what he's going to do and then demanding respect after he finally gets around to doing it.

Okay, so, in order to prepare for his role in "The Power," Santaros goes on a ride-along with a cop, Roland Taverner (Seann William Scott). Taverner, and his twin brother Ronald, have connections to the underground radical Neo-Marxists, who seek to bring down the company that runs all the government's surveillance, US Ident.

These stories are intertwined with many, many others. We follow a cop played by Jon Lovitz who has hooked up with another one of the rebels, played by Cheri Oteri. Wallace Shawn portrays a brilliant scientist who may have invented a perpetual motion machine capable of cleanly providing the world with energy. Timberlake's narrator even appears during the film, dealing a mysterious futuristic drug that's based on the same technology as Shawn's energy machine. (I think he's actually dead, though...Discuss...) Amy Poehler plays another radical with a really stupid plan to embarrass and discredit Taverner. Christopher Lambert appears in the film driving an ice cream truck around but otherwise not really doing much. There's a wacky musical number, a bunch of crap about the space-time continuum, a really slack dance sequence and, of course, several midgets. Because it's just not a surreal indie film without a midget.

Most of this garbage is just odd for the sake of oddity. Southland Tales occasionally gets weird or silly enough to elicit a giggle. Like, any time Jon Lovitz is called upon to say something severe or tough, or the surprise first appearance by Curtis Armstrong (better known to the world as "Booger" from Revenge of the Nerds) or the CG car sex scene. There's definitely an attempt by Kelly to play off his Donnie Darko success by concocting another apocalyptic sci-fi comedy loaded with Jesus symbolism and also an attempt to replicate some of the style of David Lynch.

In addition to the aforementioned midgets, we get lots of random shots of fires, mysterious backlit foreign-accented conspirators with strange haircuts, portentous non sequitur dialogue and Rebekah Del Rio performing a traditionally English song in Spanish. (You'll recall, she sung Roy Orbison's "Crying" in Spanish in Lynch's Mulholland Drive. Here, she sings the American National Anthem in Spanish.) Some scenes, particularly all the sequences focused on Wallace Shawn and his team of scientific weirdos, feel almost like a parody of Lynch's style, but I'm not sure this is intentional.

For the most part, Kelly seems to be taking this material seriously, which is of course the problem. He's clearly a creative and even funny guy, but his skills as a political satirist and social commentator leave much to be desired. Southland Tales clearly seeks to make some kind of critique, both of our politics and our media. The main on-screen drama is constantly being interrupted in favor of simulated "media" - newscasts commenting on the main action, snippets of broadcasts from background radios and TV sets, the aforementioned and highly intrusive computer readouts introducing us to various facets of future-America. But it doesn't add up to anything. What's Kelly's take on media? That it's a tool for government propaganda? That's it's full of meaningless drivel with no connection to reality? That it numbs the populace into a state of disconnected apathy? The film seems to say all of these things and none of them, and it certainly doesn't present even these basic kinds of observations convincingly or with anything that could be considered a real perspective.

Despite the obvious time and care spent crafting every nuance of his fictional universe (there's even a series of comic books setting up the story of Southland Tales in greater detail, in case 2.5 hours of blather isn't enough for you), there really isn't much of interest going on, in the margins or otherwise. This is a world that is, in many ways, too similar to ours to work as effective metaphor or as an intriguing setting for an ensemble dramedy. I guess the chat show that Krysta hosts from the beach is supposed to comment on the vapidity of shows like "The View," and the government's fear-mongering over nuclear attacks from Syria mirror our own leaders' obsessive push for war with Iraq and Iran, but it's so similar to our present reality, the points don't really get driven home. We're treated to many, many shots of US Ident's surveillance technology, but we don't really see anyone use them for anything. The system just looks like banks of monitors covering every wall. They have no meaning to us aside from set design, and yet opposition to their invasive control drives the entire film. What are they being used for? What hold do they have on those being watched, and the watchers?

Kelly's so busy worldbuilding to bother giving his story some actual stakes or momentum. As a result, he's made a flat, ceaselessly dull disaster, a movie that's, in its present state, thoroughly unwatchable. I'm not sure how I managed to sit through all 140 minutes.

There Will Be Blood

Paul Thomas Anderson's saga of the early California oil industry, There Will Be Blood, is based very loosely on Upton Sinclair's novel, Oil!. According to the writer/director Anderson, he started out adapting that novel, intrigued by its visceral descriptions of the hardships faced by oilmen in this era, but strayed from the source material more and more, turning away from "living history" and focusing more on the psychology of protagonist Daniel Plainview. Though he abandoned much of the action and purpose of Sinclair's muckraking book, Anderson has nevertheless made a film that feels like a dense work of literary fiction.

The film has been described frequently as "strange," or "bizarre" or "difficult," and I think this is a reaction to the depth and intensity of Anderson's examination of Plainview, which is a kind of focused character study increasingly uncommon in the cinema. (It recalls the more esoteric Hollywood films of the '70s in some ways, and Blood is dedicated to Robert Altman, whose work was clearly influential to Anderson. But its hard to find true comparisons with this movie even among the classic Westerns and period films of that era).

Plainview, portrayed by the legendary Daniel Day-Lewis, is quite simply one of the most fascinating cinematic creations of this decade. How far from the traditional modern film performance is Day-Lewis here? Honestly, it's like night and day. This guy can suggest a vast spectrum of emotion without uttering a single word. There's a scene in which he explodes in rage at a business rival in a crowded restaurant, but the sour glare he initially shoots at the man is almost more alarming than the final, violent confrontation. Even modern actors whose work I really enjoy, like Clive Owen or Tony Leung or Naomi Watts or Phillip Seymour Hoffman, none of them have this kind of presence on-screen. The comparison to Day-Lewis' work in Gangs of New York is an obvious one, but I think he's even better here - less cartoonish, more repressed, at least twice as angry but unable to find a way to express that or any other emotion. I thought for sure that Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men would be my favorite turn by any actor this year, but it's only one week later and I've had to rethink that stance...



We follow Plainview's career and personal life from 1898, when he labored in isolation as a silver miner, until the late 1920's, when he's an angry old curmudgeon living off his ill-gotten gains. We find him, pickax in hand, chipping away at a wall of rock desperately hoping to find something valuable. His chosen work is painful and dangerous, and he spends the vast majority of his time completely alone. After several years, he has saved up enough to start his own oil company, and develops an unerringly reliable sense for where to find oil and how to exploit whatever locals are sitting on top of it at the time.

He essentially becomes a traveling salesman, journeying across California convincing people that he will share the wealth of their property once they've signed everything over to him. Therefore, Plainview must appear to be a good, honest, salt-of-the-earth type individual, even though it's clear to the viewer from fairly early on that he doesn't care about anyone or anything save wealth and status. He adopts the orphaned son of one of his employees who dies on the job, takes in a man claiming to be his long-lost brother, and even attends the local church even though the notion of humbling himself before God seems to turn his stomach.

He needs the citizens of Little Boston, who sit atop one of the largest oil finds in the West, to see him as one of their own, so he must work God rhetorically into all his grandiose speeches and even make nice with the preening reverend of the local church, Eli Sunday (a terrifically disturbed performance from Paul Dano). Going through the motions of being a good man, however, cannot actually make someone a good man, and this principle alone appears to disprove the very basis of Christian thought. (Or does it? During one of Sunday's sermons, he claims that, even though he may wish everyone on Earth can be saved, the truth is that they cannot. Is this acceptance of the existence of evil among humanity a fundamental Christian principle, or the antithesis of Jesus' inclusion-focused? And isn't this an interesting conversation for an American MOVIE to spark?)

Much of Daniel's story concerns his need to coddle religious believes with his personal disgust with religion. A scene in which Sunday "saves" Plainview's soul in front of the entire town, shot entirely in close-up on Day-Lewis' pained grimace, tells you all you need to know about these men and their relationship. This is not about God and salvation; it's a power struggle, one man using his position in the community to bend a stronger man to his will. Brilliant, intricately-detailed work here from Anderson, Day-Lewis, Dano and cinematographer Robert Elswit.



The entire film, really, is a tribute to Elswit's keen eye and gracefulness with the camera. During the Q&A session after the film, moderator Judd Apatow (no, I don't know why he was there either...), in between painfully lame wisecracks, noted that the film was shot very simply and in a straight-forward manner. Anderson agreed, saying that he was limited by shooting most of the film out of doors, but I think he was just trying to be nice because, to my mind, this could not be more wrong. Blood is, in fact, far more understated than Anderson's other films (particularly the stylish and spazzy Boogie Nights), but it's not exactly Ozu either. There are numerous amazing long-takes, swooping tracking shots and breathtakingly scenic vistas. (One incredible early shot moves from Day-Lewis' battered form pulling himself along the rocky ground up to the mountains in the far horizon, showing you just how far he has to go to find civilization. Hardly a simple, straight-forward bit of imagery). The use of earth tones, viscous blacks and various shades of brown, also struck me as rather masterful, draping the entire film in filth and grime, just as the main characters spend their time rooting through soil and dirt in their quest for financial gain.

The entire art department has done phenomenal work here, bringing this era to stunning life on screen. Though, as I've said, the film focuses on Plainview's damaged psyche and deteriorating relationships, the visuals provide a tremendous insight into the conditions of early oil fields, the nature of the oil business at the time and the rough and thoroughly alien landscape of California only a century ago. (The film was shot in West Texas because nowhere in California actually looks like this any more.)

There Will Be Blood is an amazing movie; a hugely-entertaining, often-hilarious, darkly troubling, thought-provoking, informative, frightening, expertly-made epic. It opens right around Christmas and I will be seeing it again at that time. I love this time of year; I actually get to go see good movies in the theater, an excruciatingly rare event from January to October.

Durpa Durpa Tweedley Durpa Durp...Have I Converted You Yet?

Wow...This "defense" of religion from Christianity Today is seriously one of the silliest, least-convincing cases for faith I have ever read. It's as if writer Stan Guthrie assumed that, by citing single sentences from various other writers on the general topic of religion, he could forge a compelling argument through an act of sheer will. It doesn't work...Kind of sad, really.

Let's face it: Atheism is in. Not since Nietzsche have disbelievers enjoyed such a ready public reception to their godless message—and such near-miraculous royalties. But even that hasn't put them in a good mood. Snaps Christopher Hitchens, who wrote God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons
Everything (although not, presumably, the pronouncements of atheists), "Many of the teachings of Christianity are, as well as being incredible and mythical, immoral." A feuding Richard Dawkins suggests that believers "just shut up." Apparently, they didn't get the tolerance memo.

I'm not 100% certain that atheism is "in," though this would be a question worth exploring. "Does the relatively recent national discussion about atheist belief in our culture necessarily mean that there are more atheists, or could it just be that the atheists who have been here all along suddenly feel a bit more empowered to state their beliefs openly?" Guthrie's not interested in this question, however, because he'd have to do "research" and consider "evidence." And just making up lists based on nonsense is easier.

So here we go...

Creation: The universe, far from being a howling wasteland indifferent to our existence, appears to be finely tuned through its estimated 13.7 billion years of existence to support life on this planet. Tinker with any one of scores of fundamental physical laws or the initial conditions of the universe—such as gravity or the cosmological constant—and we would not be here. As physicist Paul Davies has admitted, "I have come to believe more and more strongly that the physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as a brute fact."

Seriously, religious people? I don't ever want to hear this argument again. I am tired of this discussion, because it never ever changes. You think the alignment of conditions that support human life on Earth must have been the work of a celestial being, I think it all just kind of came together here, and if it hadn't, we'd all be alive and evolving on some other planet, because the universe had pretty much infinite opportunities to make this work. (How can you say anything is impossible in an infinite system? Doesn't the lack of time make anything pretty much possible if you include enough variables?) This argument makes it sound like the Earth just appeared one day in a vacuum, looking exactly the way it does now. The universe is MASSIVE and it has been around for longer than any of us can fully comprehend in our primitive brains.

Also, I don't care what single sentences, robbed of their context, a random physicist might have uttered. That doesn't make it any more or less likely that humans are alive on Earth because the specific conditions that support our life existed on this planet. (Also, I don't think there's any such thing as a brute fact. There are facts and non-facts.)

Beauty: Beethoven's Ninth, a snowflake, the sweet smell of a baby who has been sleeping, and a sunset beyond the dunes of Lake Michigan all point to a magnificent and loving Creator. And isn't it interesting that we have the capacity—unlike mere animals—to gape in awe, to be brought to tears, before them? Truly did David say, "What is man, that you are mindful of him?"

To me, nothing confirms my atheism more than music. Just as Stan here can't bring himself to believe that anything as intricate and perfect as Earth just sprung up one day, I can't believe that any person was able to compose the "Ninth Symphony." And yet...one man did. A person, not a God. It exists because we made it, not because some deity squirted it into being. That's humanism, brah. As for the sunset on Lake Michigan, it is also beautiful, and it is not human-created, but we can explain it. And if we were alive on some other planet, and sunsets were blue-black and ugly, we'd probably have found them beautiful too, after several thousands of years. You come to appreciate what you know.

And of course it's interesting that we've evolved consciousness to appreciate such things. But...so what? How does that prove Christianity? At this point in the essay, Stan seems to realize that he's falling into the Intelligent Design trap, making his case for religious really just a case for some kind of external, intelligent Creator-God-Thing. So he has no choice but to painfully, and ludicrously, shift gears. This is when shit starts to get funny.

New Testament reliability: Compared with the handful of existing copies of seminal ancient works such as Homer's Iliad, the New Testament's provenance is far better attested. There are thousands of NT manuscripts in existence, some made within mere decades of the events they report. Scholar F. F. Bruce said, "The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar."

'Kay, I'm no historian by trade, but even I know that's bullshit. We have primary sources attesting to Caeser's reality as a person, including HIS OWN WRITINGS about his military campaigns. (Check out Mahalo's Julius Caeser page to give them a read.) Jesus may certainly have been real; so far as I know, the case is still out, though the majority of actual real professional historians I've heard speak on the topic tend to opine that he's representative of a number of prophets and rabbis from the time, not just one guy.

It's this sentence that's so stupid: "some made within mere decades of the events they report." But we have documents that report on events in their own time! This is not some golden standard for historical accuracy. "Some people wrote some stuff that contradicts other stuff within a few decades of when this theoretical stuff happened! Case closed!" Finally, "Scholar F.F. Bruce"? Nice try...Make that evangelical Bible scholar F.F. Bruce. Of course he thinks Jesus was real. It was the basis of his religious faith not to mention his life's work!

This article is titled "Answering the Atheists." So, in seeking to affirm that the New Testament is a reliable source for accurate historical information (and even scholar F.F. Bruce admitted it was "imprecise"), this is what Stan comes up with. Yikes...

Scripture: Unlike other religious texts, the Bible gives us the good, the bad, and the ugly of its heroes: Abraham, Jacob, David, and Peter among them. Further, Scripture's message rings true. It has been said that human depravity is the only religious doctrine empirically verified on a daily basis. And the Bible's gracious solution to our predicament, Christ's atoning death on the Cross, uniquely emphasizes what God has done, not what we must do, for our rescue.

Here's about the point when I kind of give up on Stan. This just doesn't make any sense at all. For real. It's a bunch of random sentences that line up at all, clumsily ordered into paragraph form. Try to unpack the argument he's making now.

The Bible's message "rings true?" REALLY? Cause...it doesn't so much ring true to me, what with the constant contradiction of scientific principles and reliance on fairy tale logic. (Does the story of Jonah and the Whale "ring true"? What about a man who can heal the sick, walk on water, transform water into wine and raise the dead? The whole point of "faith" is that this stuff doesn't ring true and you have to kind of force yourself to believe it.)

The Bible's "gracious" solution to our unnamed predicament was a man being tortured and assassinated? That's not so gracious. I could think of a lot cleaner, neater ways for us all to be saved than a guy being stabbed, nailed to a cross and pecked at by crows.

I don't even understand the last sentence's basic meaning, so lets move on.

Jesus: Christ's life and teachings are unparalleled in world history, as any Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim—or atheist—worth his salt will admit. Napoleon reportedly said, "I know men, and I tell you that Jesus Christ is not a man. Superficial minds see a resemblance between Christ and the founders of empires and the gods of other religions. That resemblance does not exist. There is between Christianity and whatever other religions the distance of infinity."

Now we're supposed to take Napoleon's word for it? The guy responsible for at least six million European deaths? What a good Christian he was...

And that first sentence is just horrible, ugly Christian supremacy stated as fact, the equal of saying that "The white race is just unparalleled in world history, as any African or Asian or South American worth his salt will admit." If a Muslim "worth his salt" really felt that Christ's life and teachings were unparalleled in world history, why would he be troubling himself with this Muhammad fellow? True, if everything Christian's believe about Jesus were true, he'd be a fairly remarkable specimen - a compassionate half-divine educator and prophet who walked around, healing the sick and speaking about peace and love. But that's only if you believe everything that Christian's believe, and this article is supposed to explain why Stan is a Christian. So it's unfair that we be asked to accept all the doctrines as true from the get-go.

The trilemma: C.S. Lewis, commenting on Christ's claim to divinity, said: "You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."

I've seriously heard this argument since junior high school. They must teach it to the fundies at a seriously young age.

Which is too bad, because it's stupid, and it's going to make it harder for these young people to fully understand the nature of logic and rhetoric in later years. Again, this only works if you FIRST ACCEPT that everything the New Testament says is true. If Jesus is being accurately quoted for the entire book, then yes, he's either a crazy person, a bullshit artist or the son of God.

But what if he's being misquoted? This book was, after all, written by his own followers years after his death, when they were feverishly trying to convince the maximum number of people possible to accept him as the son of God, a decision that often meant being fed to lions, tortured or just plain executed. There was a huge benefit to flubbing the truth, would you not admit, and no downside? And it was unlikely that anyone could prove he wasn't the son of God because he was dead and it was fucking Biblical times. Proof didn't really enter into the conversation.

So C.S. Lewis is trying to urge non-Christians to make a decision based on...Christian doctrine. Solid...

It just goes on and on like this, and frankly I'm bored, but I can't finish this post off without including this priceless quote:

"While many Christians have behaved badly, Christ specializes in turning sinners around. What other faith can boast of a Chuck Colson?"

Yup, you've got me there, Stan. There's only one disgraced for Nixon Chief Council and rabidly right-wing nutjob Charles Colson, and he plays for your team. This is the same guy that blames American decadence for terrorism:

There was a brilliant but paranoid Egyptian writer by the name of Sayyid Qutb, imprisoned in Egypt in 1956. In 1970, he published a book, In the Shade of the Koran, attacking the West as totally corrupt. Qutb knew what he was talking about. He lived in the U.S. for a time and saw our decadence. He also read Western philosophers like [Martin] Heidegger and [Jacques] Derrida and other intellectuals who hated the West. And he read all the anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic literature.

Qutb's In the Shade of the Koran unequivocally advocates killing of "infidels." He was executed by the Egyptian government, but his brother, Muhammad Qutb, escaped Egypt, went to Saudi Arabia, and became a professor at the university. One of his star pupils: none other than Osama bin Laden.

Lovely...

He's the same Charles Colson, a shining light of truth that confirms the essential rationality of the Christian faith, who said that the illegal immigration problem stems from legal abortion:

Not really much to add to that. It's like praising Judaism because, hey, we gave you Jackie Mason AND David Berkowitz!

[Hat Tip: Sullivan]

Renee Zellweger Has Issues

I mean, aside from looking like a constipated chipmunk.

Defamer today links to an story about Renee Zellweger's interview with the fine people of the appropriately-titled Bazaar magazine. (Yes, I realize it's a different meaning/spelling of "bizarre," but it's a fucking pun, so who cares?)

"It's weird to have fame precede you in any situation ... and I'm very proud of myself that I've not been to Betty Ford (Center) yet," Zellweger, 38, tells Harper's Bazaar. "Never say never!"

You'd think she'd kind of be over the whole "I'm famous" thing by now. Jerry Maguire was 1996, lady. If you're not over being the center of attention by now, you never will be. (Also, I can't help but think that if she was really this queasy about fame, she'd stop acting in massively-budgeted Hollywood star vehicles.)

Among her career achievements? "Learning what my boundaries are. That I've been able to stay out of the psychiatric wards despite the really bizarre exchanges I have on a daily basis," she says in the magazine's December issue, on newsstands Nov. 20.

A lot of actors would have no choice but to answer this question in an evasive fashion, because they don't have any big hits or popular films on their resumes to which they can refer. There's just no way Alyssa Milano's not going to feel embarrassed answering this question. I mean, she's most proud of her fine work on "Charmed"? Embrace of the Vampire? The classic Mark Wahlberg-Reese Witherspoon-decapitated dog thriller Fear?

Even though I'm not a fan, Renee Zellweger has got some monster hits to her credit. Sure, I don't think Maguire, Cold Mountain or Chicago are anything to be all that proud of, but a lot of people LOVE those movies.

So why give such a silly answer? You're most proud of not being committed to a psychiatric ward? Really?

It just keeps coming back to how WEIRD her life is because of her fame. I mean, how could it still seem so weird after 11 years? 1996! That's enough time to get used to pretty much anything. Does OJ Simpson still wake up every day and trip out about having gotten away with butchering his ex-wife? Does Courtney Love still talk constantly about how her rock star husband shot himself in the face? I haven't heard Magic Johnson mention the phrases "HIV" or "AIDS" in YEARS.

The year before Jerry Maguire made Renee Zellweger famous, Christopher Reeve fell off a horse. It took about as long for him to sustain his injury, begin recovery, become an international icon for strength amidst adversity, introduce the cause of stem cell research to the general American public and die gracefully as it has taken Renee Zellweger to adjust to life as a well-known actress. If she were John Travolta, Renee would have had, like, 6 comebacks already.

But the whining CONTINUES!

Zellweger prefers privacy to hanging out with the Hollywood crowd — in public at least. "I'm not a big scene girl," she says. "If I see the scene once a year, that's more than plenty."

The Bridget Jones star says an ideal night out could be a "really nice Christmas party."

I'm estimating Renee is one of 6-8 people left on the planet who use the term "scene" unironically.

"I love to go to somebody's house when it gets a little bit later and there's dancing and laughter and nobody's pointing at the weird actor-girl in the corner," says Zellweger, an Oscar winner for 2003's Cold Mountain.

See what I mean? The "actor-girl" thing is clearly an obsession. Even if the AP article about this Bazaar article were purposefully zeroing in only on the quotes in which she obsessed about fame, she would still be bringing the subject up too often. I mean, I find it kind of hard to believe that Renee Zellweger is being ostracized and made into a spectacle everywhere she goes. In West L.A., the only people I see getting this kind of treatment are Madonna, La Lohan and Paris. Everyone else pretty much gets left alone.

(For real! Once, I saw Bruce Willis, Demi Moore and Rumor Willis together at the Century City Mall, and everyone was making a tremendous effort not to gawk at them. Because gawking at celebrities is not cool.)

I mean, I'm sure it's different once you're being constantly recognized, but come on. This is overkill.

There's No Such Thing As Ghosts

I've always lived in big cities, and I try to surround myself with the most interesting, intelligent individuals possible (though I'm not always successful). So I tend to spend my time in the company of largely reasonable types. Among my close friends, the rates of belief in Zeus, Jesus, the Wolfman, Cthulhu and "The Secret" are roughly comparable.

Yet I still find myself with alarming frequency conversing with someone who believes in ghosts. Ghosts! I can't wrap my mind around this.

How can you possibly believe in ghosts?

People who really want to believe in ghosts try to kind of cheat sometimes. Like, they don't believe ghosts are actually dead people come back to some form of life. They're "shadows" or "impressions" left behind by people who are now gone. All that "spiritual" nonsense. "Oh, I'm not religious, but I'm very spiritual..." That's almost worse. You're still an idiot; this is like being an idiot who lacks an ability to commit and a sense of purpose. If you're going to believe in superstitious bunk, why not go all the way and pray towards Mecca 5x daily? Just get it over with...

You're either alive or you're dead, and if you're a ghost, that certainly means you aren't alive, by definition. So there, New Age-y ghost-nostics.

BUT JUST BELIEVING IN LIFE AFTER DEATH still wouldn't mean you believe in GHOSTS! Even if you accept that people may linger around after they die, despite the fact that we have no evidence of this fact, there has never been a single verifiable instance of a dead person returning to life and it violates almost everything we know about biology, you still have to believe in the ability of these dead spirits to make themselves known to human beings, whose senses aren't really all that acute! I'm likely to stub my toe on a fucking BED if the lights are off, and that thing's large and solid, not to mention present in my bedroom at all times. How am I expected to see the faint outline that was once my Great Uncle Horace?

Scientists estimate there are well over 10 dimensions, layered all on top of one another, all around us, and we can see 3 of them. So how the hell would we be able to see a ghost? Most of us can't find our keys.

Anyway, that's all prelude to this video that aired on some local news broadcast of a weird blue cloud hanging around a gas station freaking out the squares. I can't actually explain this blue cloud to you, because I'm kind of an idiot at all this sciencey stuff, but I'm 100% CERTAIN there's a good, logical, reasonable, non-ghost-related explanation. Because there's NO SUCH THING AS GHOSTS. Also, aliens, Godzillas, The Da Vinci Code, talking sponges living in pineapples, angels, zombies and Islamofascists. It's all just horseshit.

[My thanks to my fellow Vaquero Sean for the link]

I'm Laughing at Tom Tancredo, Because SOMEONE HAS TO!

I recall a high school AP US History class discussion about the Cold War. I remember wondering what it must be like to live in a country fueled by that kind of terror and hysteria. Did they really force children to crawl under their desks and cover their heads in the hopes of staving off the effects of a nuclear attack? It seemed almost unimaginable, from my secure vantage point in an upper-class Southern California suburb, that there was ever a time in America when the fear of imminent destruction was so palpable.

Let's be honest: 2007 in the United States is not so much more dangerous than 1995. I haven't spent several hours scouring the Net for statistical evidence to back this up, but I'm guessing that, even if you factor in 9/11, I'm not at a significantly greater risk of being murdered by a foreign national now than I was 12 years ago. Yet we're right back to that old-school hysteria. I don't need to imagine what it must be like to live amongst a people cowering in constant fear of foreign invasion and terrorism; I'm living amongst these people right now.

And let me tell you, it's horrible. Not because I'm constantly afraid like so many of my countrymen, mind you. At least, I'm not constantly afraid of dirty bombs and brown people. But because it's just depressing to see Americans wallow in anxious despair like this, for this long. A few weeks after 9/11? Okay, fine, be afraid, think about the ramifications of an attack on U.S. soil.

But it's years and years later, we clearly have no immediate outside threat bearing down on us (that isn't environmental, that is). The drumbeat of terror-related panic, at this point, has morphed in a particularly ugly, futile strain of self-pity. "Oh, woe is us, people don't like us! The crazy president of Iran said he wishes we didn't even exist any more! There's questionable types coming across our border with backpacks! Boo hoo hoo!"

It's fucking pathetic. Seriously. And, as I find myself repeating more and more these days, no one is more pathetic than Republican Presidential candidate Tom Tancredo. NO ONE.



I mean, it's not just a disgusting attempt to manipulate simpletons. It's a POORLY DONE disgusting attempt to manipulate simpletons. This ad's more thrown-together and crudely-realized than "Turkish Star Wars." I mean, Tommy, you're running a national campaign for President, not a late-night public access chat show.

Dopplr! It's Everywhere You Want to Be!

So, I make my major podcast debut today in the Mahalo Daily. Check out my stirring performance as, um, "Dopplr Loser #1"!



Also featured on Mahalo today...Mr Toilet!

That is all.

Facebook News Network

This entire sketch is essentially one joke, but it's a pretty funny joke. What if your Facebook News feed had its own TV show?

Private Snowball

I usually try to sugarcoat these depressing stories about creeping fascism with a dash of humor, to make them go down easier, but it's hard making this funny:

As Congress debates new rules for government eavesdropping, a top intelligence official says it is time that people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people's private communications and financial information.

See, personally, I don't think a good definition of privacy allows for constant surveillance by the government (AND BUSINESS!). Kerr seems to think that, so long as the public at large doesn't have immediate access to information, that this information can be considered "private," even if business types and government employees take a gander at it all the time.

In other words, spying on the ladies' locker room is wrong...unless you're the principal, in which case, spying on the ladies' locker room is just fine. Encouraged, even. Just don't let the vice-principal see!

Any time government employees start telling me to change my definitions of things, I get suspicious. (Yes, even when Bill Clinton told me to change my definition of "is," in case any of you readers thought you could catch me in some sort of hypocritical Serbian Jew double-bluff or something, as you are wont to do). When they tell me to change my definition of privacy, I am no longer suspicious. I am fearful. And angry. And, now that you bring it up, kind of hungry.

What a Charmer...

We're really blessed this election cycle to have not one but TWO completely inept Republican candidates to mock.

First up, Mittens Romney. Let's see how many embarrassing inanities he can utter over the course of a single, brief ABC News article:

On Saturday, Romney met a former Marine along the route who said that "being informed military" he was "really concerned" about the troops overseas and he wants a change. Romney disagreed with him, saying, "I'm a little more encouraged than you are," and encouraged him to "take a close look."

Yes, please, Former Marine. Take a closer look at Iraq and you'll see that everything over there's tip-top.

Four civilians were killed when a roadside bomb struck their bus in the centre of the northern city of Mosul, police Brigadier General Abdel Karim al-Juburi said.

Another six people, including a woman and her daughter, were wounded in the morning attack in the city's Raas al-Jadha area, he said.

Two people were killed in a roadside bomb attack in Baghdad, while a street vendor walking on a road in the city of Baquba was shot dead by unknown gunmen, security officials said.

Hey, that's super...

US military officials are putting huge pressure on interrogators who question Iraqi insurgents to find incriminating evidence pointing to Iran, it was claimed last night.
....
Brose, 30, who extracts information from detainees in Iraq, said: 'They push a lot for us to establish a link with Iran. They have pre-categories for us to go through, and by the sheer volume of categories there's clearly a lot more for Iran than there is for other stuff. Of all the recent requests I've had, I'd say 60 to 70 per cent are about Iran.

'It feels a lot like, if you get something and Iran's not involved, it's a let down.' He added: 'I've had people say to me, "They're really pushing the Iran thing. It's like, shit, you know." '

Promising!

So, I think we can all agree with the Mittster. Things in Iraq are getting so much better all the time.



Let's continue.

Romney kept the mood lighter at times. Stopping by one young couple's house, he remarked at the large leaves on their tree, quipping, "Adam and Eve would not have looked as promiscuous if they had had leaves this big."

Honestly, ABC News' Matt Stuart, I'm not sure that can accurately be described as "quipping." Woody Allen quips. Oscar Wilde quipped. This kind of avuncular, folksy observation is "expelled," perhaps. "Bloviated" could work. "Upchucked", even. Let me take a crack at it.

"Romney kept the mood lighter at times. Stopping by one young couple's home, he remarked at the large leaves on their tree, expectorating, "INSERT mundane Biblical reference implying that somehow even a pre-sin Adam and Even were promiscuous wearing only leaves over their naughty, ugly, hideous, disgusting, foul genitals HERE."

Now THAT'S fair and balanced!

Along the way, he also met at least one unfriendly resident, McGuire, a Scottish Terrier who started barking as Romney knocked on the door. One reporter suggested he bring dog biscuits next time. Romney joked that he should "bring some of them out for you guys," referencing the crowd of media following him.

What does that even mean? How are journalists like dogs? Seriously, I don't understand a joke Mitt Romney made, and it's kind of freaking me out.

In any normal election cycle, Mitt Romney would be the most ridiculous idiot to throw his propeller beanie into the ring. But he's actually running a close second this time behind Fred "Foghorn" Thompson. Here's, I say, here's the latest ad from the star of "Law and Order." No, not that one. No, he's from "SVU." Think "old" and "ludicrous." The guy who was also in "Baby's Day Out." Yeah, that guy.



I'm Lon Harris, and I'm shocked anyone would televise this message.

"Our rights come from God, not from government"? I know his whole strategy is to convince the nutters to vote for him over Giuliani, but...that's just un-American, plain and simple. And NOT BECAUSE I think our rights come from government. Our rights don't come from anywhere. That's why they're "our rights." This is the founding principle of our Republic, folks, and Fred Thompson doesn't understand how it works.

We all have natural rights. We don't owe them to Fred Thompson's God or anyone else. This is not a semantic argument. Consider abortion. I think, as do most reasonable people, that a woman has a natural right to control her own body, and therefore abortion is a personal matter, not a civic manner upon which the government should render an opinion. Fred Thompson, who proudly boasts of his "100% pro-life record," believes the exact opposite. He thinks that a woman does not have a right to her own body. God has a right to her body, and he loans it out to her most of the time, but when there's a fetus in it, the rights revert back to the Big Man Upstairs. Therefore, though he'd like to avoid having to admit it, Fred Thompson does think, on occasion, that the government should be allowed to make person decisions fwomen, because the government is merely acting on behalf of He Who Owns All Rights to Everyone At All Times Forever.

(Even though Fred Thompson doesn't attend church regular, he apparently still thinks he knows God's will. Odd how that works out.)

Sherri Shepherd Continues Sapping My Will to Live

Sherri Shepherd is the newest host on "The View" and one of the most insane idiots on television. And I'm including animated characters here. She gives Jabberjaw a run for his money. (Jabberjaw, you young'uns won't recall, was an animated shark who talked like Curly from "The Three Stooges" but nonetheless frequently uttered Rodney Dangerfield's catchphrase, "I don't get no respect." Ripping off two comedians at once was considered a divine outpouring of imaginative brilliance at '70s Hanna-Barbera.)

Anyway, you may remember Shepherd's previous CBI appearance, in which she claimed to have no opinion on the pressing, urgent matter of the shape of the planet. Barbra Walters asked if the Earth was flat, Shepherd answered, and I quote, "I don't know. I never thought about it." Now, "Yes" is the incorrect answer to Walters' question.

"Is the world flat?"

"Yes."

Wrong. Cut and dry.

Shepherd somehow manages to go beyond the wrong answer, to come up with something even more incorrect. At least the person who thinks the world is flat has considered the nature of the world around them for a fleeting moment. Shepherd obviously has nothing going on whatsoever upstairs, to the point that she has never paused and actually had a thought about the universe and her place therein. Now that's pow'rful stupid.

I'm not sure if it's theoretically possible to top that abysmal episode for sheer dumbassery. But Shepard seems determined to try. Here she is destroying what miniscule shards remained of my faith in humanity, mangling a Christmas carol in a slavish act of devotion to her sponsors, the woefully misguided suckers at Dodge Caravan.



Now consider this - the scene you have just witnessed is meant to advertise the Dodge Caravan. They want you to see this woman swerve around their habitat-decimating vehicle like a disoriented panda, howling like a mental patient, and model your own behavior on hers. Best of luck with that, chief.

No Country For Old Men

Yes! Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes! Fuck yes! Awesome! Fucking finally! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!

I'm pleased to report to you that, for the first time since 2001's terrific The Man Who Wasn't There, the Coen Brothers have actually directed a real movie again. (Don't even try to remember the two...items...they released in the interim. They're not worth it.) No Country for Old Men is a total return to form for the Coens. Literally. It takes them back to the form of their 1984 debut, Blood Simple - occasionally gruesome, darkly funny thriller.

Joel and Ethan demonstrate the same kind of impeccable timing and mastery of form here that's on display in classics like Blood Simple, Fargo and Miller's Crossing, but also a grim intensity that's pretty much entirely new to their filmography. No Country's expertly shot like their other films (by frequent collaborator Roger Deakins), it's often hilarious with a tremendous ear for quirkly dialect and slang like their other films, but it's also brutal and intense. Relentless, even.

What I found most refreshing about the film, and what makes it a total departure from their previous, lackluster outings, is that they no longer feel desperate to please. No Country is a difficult movie, a harsh movie, and it doesn't always make perfect sense. For about 2 hours, it's a shocking, violent chase movie, and then everything changes.

I sense that many will find the conclusion frustrating. But it's a rare thing to see filmmakers take a movie where it needs to go rather than where the audience might want it to go. The set-up is so crackerjack here, you'd have to be crazy not to want some direct, explosive and unambiguous conclusion. But the Coens (working from a novel by Cormac McCarthy) give you something even more satisfying. A mystery. A curiosity. As Sheriff Ed Tom Bell might say, signs and wonders.



The action begins in a series of stark, nearly silent desert sequences. A Texas hunter, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), stumbles across the remnants of a drug deal gone sour. The truckload of product and the dead Mexicans don't interest him much. But the briefcase containing $2 million strikes him as a bit more useful.

Before he can even discuss his newfound wealth with his wife Carla Jean (Kelly MacDonald), Llewelyn becomes the target of some very very bad men. There's the remaining drug dealers who want their money back, of course, as well as shifty gun-for-hire Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson, as good as he's been in a movie in years). As if that wasn't enough, Llewelyn's also being sought by seen-it-all Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (a note-perfect Tommy Lee Jones), who doesn't seem terribly concerned about the massacre in his district but nonetheless wonders why Moss' truck was found near the scene.

Llewelyn's a resourceful guy, so he's not too afraid of these initial threats. His main worry comes in the form of unstoppable lunatic Anton Chigurh, who lurches around West Texas carrying a cumbersome air gun and isn't afraid to use it on the forehead of some innocent passer-by. Chigurh is played by Javier Bardem in one of the most idiosyncratic, peculiar and ingenious performances in any Coen Brothers film, EVER. And these are guys known for their idiosyncratic, peculiar characters.

Bardem's got the look of Chigurh down, the stilted manner of speaking, the body language, the whole deal, but what really sells this psychopath are the little tics and details. This guy is a complete monster - not just a willing murderer, but a man who feels totally justified in killing. It's unclear whether he's on a kill-crazy rampage to access the money or whether the money just provides his latest excuse for going on a kill-crazy rampage. Bardem makes him uncontrollably crazy but also recognizably human. He's vulnerable and invincible at the same time.

So well established is Chigurh's menace and Moss' sympathetic goodness, the plotting essentially takes care of itself for two hours. The Coens set up one slickly-designed, perfectly realized set piece after another. With 50 years of professional filmmaking experience between the two of them, these guys have developed finely honed instincts for playing around with an audience, and they get the most out of every jolt in McCarthy's breathlessly savage story. There's almost too many suspenseful sequences; I felt exhausted when it was all over.

(I don't want to blow anything, but there's one dazzling moment that just demands some attention. Moss, sitting in a darkened room with shotgun at the ready, hears Chigurh creeping up from outside, and sees his the shadows of his feet flash by under the door jamb. We think, "at any second, the door's going to come bursting open and there's going to be a crazy shootout." Instead, the Coens take this opportunity to raise the stakes and increase the tension, not letting you off the hook. People in the audience were split into three reactions - some yelped, others laughed and still others applauded. I did all three.)

The final act, as I said, shifts gears in some ways. A scene that doesn't feel entirely pivotal fades to black (the first time this has been used as a transition), and suddenly we're looking at things from a different perspective, taking all that has come before and combing through it for meaning. The story concludes, but in a most un-thriller-like fashion, leaving strands of narrative unresolved and far more questions than answers. (Just as Bell is nearing retirement from the Sheriff's Department, the Coens' film almost seems to enter retirement from toying with your emotions. "That's all the excitement I can handle. I'm going to let you all take it from here."

Though it's certainly ambiguous, No Country morphs into what feels like a contemplation of the meaning of Death. Specifically, the moment immediately before death, heavy with the knowledge of its impending arrival. (The storyline allows for a great many such moments throughout its 120-some minutes, although it could be argued that we spend every moment of our adult lives sick with the knowledge that soon we will day.)

The film opens with a Tommy Lee Jones monologue in which he makes plain his understanding that his job may eventually cause his demise. Moss, before making the first of several bold decisions that will place his life in danger, asks his wife to tell his mother he loves her, in case he doesn't return. (She reminds him his mother's already dead. ) Chigurh, the vicious murderer, may be the only one who isn't really at peace with the notion of his own mortality. Implicit in his constant drive to live and press on and pursue is the innate fear of ever having to stop. Perhaps his killing, the idea of the chase itself, not to mentio his fondness for watching others die, stems from a desire to conquer the one thing he can't overrun.

Should You Wash Your Hands After Going #1?

Oliver Willis says yes. Before going any further, I'd like to state for the record that, regardless of the argument I'm about to advance, I actually do wash my hands after I urinate. It's just force of habit at this point.

There's just a few things I'd like to point out.

(1) There is no reason my penis should be any more dirty than any other part of my body, and it certainly ought to be cleaner than my hands, provided I haven't been using it recently. My hands touch all kinds of dirty things all day - far far worse than my genitals - from pocket change to shoes to the floor to the exterior of my car. So why is it mandatory that I wash my hands every time I touch my penis? The thing's not radioactive.

(2) If you're getting pee on your hand when you go #1, you're doing it wrong.

In the course of making his point - that it's icky not to wash after you piss - Oliver links to this USA Today column. But they don't really make his case for him very well:

...the experts still recommend washing, for two reasons.

Reason one: You may pick up more germs than you think, from doors, flush handles and other surfaces, and from your own body. "Your gastrointestinal tract is close by," Daly says. "It all fits together, and you can't see where the microorganisms are."

Okay, see, but...that's just stupid. My gastrointestinal tract is close to my penis? I mean, speaking globally, yes, it is closer than, say, New York and The Hague. But the small of my back is also relatively close to my gastrointestinal tract, and I don't run to the washroom every time I reach back there to scratch an itch.

Let's add an addendum to the end of observation #2 above. If you're getting doody on your hand when you go #1, you're seriously doing it wrong. Like, holy shit, are you doing it wrong! Wow! If you ever find poo on your hand, for any reason, wash that fucker immediately, without hesitation.

Reason two: The restroom, stocked with sinks, soap and water, is a convenient place to wash off bacteria and viruses your hands accumulate elsewhere during the day. Studies do show groups of people who wash their hands regularly get fewer gastrointestinal and respiratory illnesses.

But this has nothing to do with washing after you go #1. This is just stating, quite obviously, that it's a decent idea to wash your hands a few times a day. Because live is messy and germs are everywhere. I can get behind that message. And I'm not even saying you shouldn't wash your hands whenever you exit a bathroom. (The "germs on the door handle" argument is fairly compelling.) But let's not go nuts here. There's far more gross things that people do each day than rush out of the bathroom after a nice tinkle without washing.

A Considerable Weekend

Did lots of stuff I had no chance to blog about this weekend. So here we go, in brief form:

American Gangster

Okay, so I watched this last week...um...illegally. But I didn't get a chance to review it. It's a pretty good flick, with some solid performances and a great soundtrack full of '70s soul. (I knew Jay-Z's latest album is a tie-in with the movie, but none of those songs actually appear in the film. It's weird from a marketing standpoint, but the decision not to go with anachronistic hip-hop in the background was a smart one.) I think the only thing that kept me from loving the movie was its familiarity.



There have been a lot of other movies about real-life drug dealers from this era, and all the stories are fairly similar. Resourceful criminal finds a way to obtain cheap narcotics from a foreign supplier, quickly rises to the top of his profession and eventually falls from grace, with the very ambition and aggressiveness that initially won him a fortune bringing about his downfall. There's nothing American Gangster really brings to that formula, and its one kind of unique element - the switching of perspectives between kingpin Frank Lucas (Washington) and the policeman chasing him (Russell Crowe) - kind of bogs the film down rather than adding anything new to the mix. It also could stand to be a bit more entertaining; the movie starts slow, and never really finds its rhythm, exactly.

Neil Young at the Nokia Theater

Caught Neil's show on Friday night with my brother and father. His wife Pegi opened with kind of a bland collection of throwback country songs. Granted, this isn't really my genre to begin with, but the set was, I hate to say it, kind of boring.

Neil then came on stage alone and played about a 45 minute acoustic set that was pretty stellar. The highlight? "A Man Needs a Maid." I never really imagined he'd pull that one out, and the performance kind of blew me away. There was this obnoxious hillbilly couple sitting directly behind me (they must have driven in from somewhere in Central California, because they had that drawl you just don't get from Los Angelinos) talking through the entire show (and always with ridiculously folksy, stupid comments), and even they shut up during "Man Needs a Maid." Although immediately afterwards, they had to comment. "I think he's got two keyboards on that stage. Sounded like two keyboards." "What was he talking about in that song? Gettin' a maid? That's hee-larious." Ugh.

Then, Neil returned for a 90 minute electric set, which includes about a half-hour's worth of jamming on "No Hidden Path," one of the songs off his new record, Chrome Dreams II. It may have gone on a bit too long, and my brother absolutely loathed this portion of the performance, but I enjoyed seeing the band get deep into spaced-out jam mode. I used to see a lot more jammy kind of bands (including, yes, Phish), and I guess I'm just not bothered it the way others seem to be. For me, the music isn't more or less boring because there's no vocals and it lacks traditional structure. If it sounds good, I'm fine with it. Not trying to put down people who don't see it that way, and there are certainly jams I've seen that have gone on way too long. (Built to Spill once played a version of "Randy Describes Eternity" that was so long, I had time to forget what song they were even playing, then remember, then forget again.)

Here's the full setlist:

From Hank To Hendrix / Ambulance Blues / Sad Movies / A Man Needs A Maid / No One Seems To Know / Harvest / Love In Mind / After The Gold Rush / Mellow My Mind / Love Art Blues / Love Is A Rose / Heart Of Gold // The Loner / Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere / Dirty Old Man / Spirit Road / Bad Fog Of Loneliness / Winterlong / Oh, Lonesome Me / The Believer / No Hidden Path // Cinnamon Girl / Cortez The Killer /Tonight's The Night

I mean, "After the Gold Rush"? "Everybody Knows This is Nowhere"? "Cortez the Killer"? No complaints here...

Here's playlist from some of the best Neil songs I could find on Seeqpod:



V Lounge

So, that was Friday night. I went to work Saturday for a few hours. Hey, somebody's got to cover the "Dog the Bounty Hunter is a Racist/Moron/Obnoxious Star of a Terrible Reality Show" case, am I right? Right? Am I right?

Then, Saturday night, I headed out with Adam from Mahalo to the birthday party of our co-worker, Jenny at V Lounge, which is a Hollywood-style nightclub in Santa Monica. Which, in case you're not from LA, is kind of strange. Anyway, we had to wait about 45 minutes outside V Lounge to get in, and during that time I actually saw one of my few close friends, randomly. (She, having boobs, naturally walked right in.) This was highly awesome, because nothing makes you look cooler in front of people you don't know that well than running into random friends outside of nightclubs. Like a Man About Town or something.

I know this may be hard for all of you to imagine, but nightclubs are actually not my scene at all. In a bar, I actually have a chance of possibly getting to know someone. That place encapsulates all the benefits of inebriation (like confidence and seeming a lot more witty) without the thunderously loud music or need to demonstrate some level of physical coordination you get in a nightclub. A club simultaneously robs my of the ability to converse (my only real asset in these kind of social situations) AND provides me with a primary activity - dancing - that's essentially an invitation to make a serious asshole out of myself. Bad news. (Also, I don't own any real club-appropriate clothing. There was a guy there wearing a half-opened shimmery black shirt with a dragon embroidered over the left shoulder. I couldn't live with myself if I paid money for something like that.)

Elizabeth: The Golden Age

Went and saw this today in Long Beach. This is the second movie in a row I've seen in a theater in Long Beach where the sound was fucked up. When I saw The Kingdom at the Marina Pacifica 12, there was a blown speaker that messed up all the low-end rumble (considerable in the film's action-heavy final act.) Today, during Elizabeth: The Golden Age at the UA Marketplace, one speaker would randomly cut in and out, totally screwing with the surround sound. It got really bad during the climactic battle versus the Spanish Armada. Seriously, am I just spoiled living in a film-conscious town like LA? Are most movie theaters around the country incapable of screening a film without these kinds of irritating technical glitches? No wonder people are just illegally downloading this shit and watching it on the computers. Relatively little chance that a quality DVD rip is going to have screwy sound issues.



As for the film, it's pretty entertaining and slickly made. I haven't seen the original Elizabeth in a while, but I recall being kind of bored during that film's midsection, so I'm tempted to say this one's better paced. Blanchett and Rush are great as always in surprisingly physical performances. (Blanchett performs a lot of the film in extreme close-up, which can't be easy to do, and Rush believably plays a weakened and frail old man). Samantha Morton was perfectly cast as Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, and has a few terrifically imperious, almost frightening scenes in which to shine. (If she had just a bit more screen time, I'd think her a natural pick for a Supporting Actress nod.)

The conclusion of the film - the 1588 attack of the Spanish Armada on England - feels a lot like a throwback historical adventure-romance with Clive Owen (playing Sir Walter Raleigh) in the Errol Flynn role. These scenes are actually kind of fun, and rather inadvertently highlights the staid dryness of the film's earlier passages.

Golden Age is also teeming with historical inaccuracy. I'm not particularly well versed on this period of English history, but even I could tell they were straining to retell all the major events of the Anglo-Spanish War within 2 hours with a minimum of excess characters. This is a shame, because I sense that most Americans know very little about the events portrayed, and they will most likely fill in these gaps in their knowledge with the inaccuracies of the movie. (A guy sitting behind me at the theater talked a lot during the film, and seemed to have very little background on any of these figures. It took him a good long while to even get his bearings. I sense wouldn't have been able to identify the country in which the movie took place if it hadn't appeared on screen at the beginning.)

It didn't really hurt my enjoyment of the movie as a movie, and I understand why a little unrequited love may have been needed for the sake of drama.

But the story of the Tudor/Stuart showdown, of the Spanish fleet's attack on England's significantly weaker Navy, of the clash between Protestantism and Catholicism that essentially defined hundreds of years of European history, has some innate drama as well, right? Do we really need to change so much to make this story work?