Anger Mismanagement

I got angry with a customer today. Very angry. More angry than I have been with anyone in a while. So angry that I was, at one point, literally shaking with rage.

It was not without cause. I'm not the kind of person to fly off the handle. The other day, I was making a left-hand turn to get out of a parking lot on to Pico, which can take a minute or two occasionally. The person behind me was screaming and honking their horn, generally carrying on as if I were kidnapping their youngest heir rather than keeping them from getting home in time for the opening credits of "CSI: Camden." That's not me.

I think I was, in fact, too courteous under these circumstances. In the future, I will aim to be more openly hostile to customers such as these, because accepting abuse from people, even in retail situations, only encourages this behavior.

Here's the situation...A guy comes in today, I won't name him...For the purposes of this post, we'll call him by a pseudonym...Buster McDermott. Okay, so Buster comes in with a copy of Star Wars: Episode I: The One With the Pod Race and wants to return it. He says it's defective. Why? Because, when removing the "security tape" that runs over the top of the box, he accidentally tore a small bit of the box's outer plastic covering.

My first reaction was to laugh at him. I mean, this is a small thing that happens all the time when you open DVD's. You rip the plastic a bit with your fingernail while you're prying off the tape. If you were to go through my DVD collection right now, I estimate 60% would have small rips in the outer plastic boxes.

So, for starters, you'd have to be a really anal-retentive, obsessive, uptight asshole to genuinely worry about a small fracture in the external covering of the box of a new DVD. Particularly a Star Wars DVD from six freaking years ago.

But this guy wasn't just upset over having ripped his own DVD...He was angry. He stated repeatedly that this was a defect in our product. In his own words, "the glue wouldn't come off, and I had to tear it."

My first reaction was to replace the box. We have a lot (and I mean a lot) of extra plastic DVD boxes at Laser Blazer. Rooms full of them. With the random DVD boxes sitting around that store, you could constrcut a full-sized replica of every spaceship featured in Star Wars: Episode I: Those Goofy Gunguns, with enough boxes left over to make a kickass fort.

But, no. Mr. McDermott needed a brand-new box, one that comes with a brand-new copy of the movies inside. I plainly refused. This was a nonsensical request. I'm not going to just give away a brand-new copy of the DVD in exchange for an open one, an open one with a damaged cover because this overzealous nitwit can't figure out how to use an Exacto knife or the edge of a pair of scissors.

He insisted that I reconsider. I offered to take down the man's phone number, ask the store's owner whenever he arrived about the situation and get back to him. He screeched that it was entirely inappropriate for me to suggest he should have to come back.

And this is where the man went completely out of his mind. I didn't catch all the nightmarish, self-serving, insane bullshit spewing from his mouth to my ears, but here are some snippets and highlights. Whenever possible, these are verbatim quotes, but some of the wording may be somewhat paraphrased. The content, though, is 100% accurate, I promise:

• I was making a big, big, horrible mistake that I would later regret
• It was outrageous that I was even giving this customer "a hard time"
• I needed to make "an executive decision"
• This man spent $200 the last time he was in the store
• The glue wouldn't come off the box, so he had no choice but to rip the plastic
• (This was my favorite part, because it's so clearly insane and off-topic. I'd like to remind you that I have witnesses, and this was all stuff the man actually said). The packaging counts as part of the product, because if they didn't care about the packaging, DVD's would be sold in plain brown envelopes. So because the packaging is ripped, the product is defective, and he should be able to return it
• I was refusing to listen
• I was being unreasonable
• He went out of his way to come to our store

During this long, intensely juvenile and loud tirade, I tried to interject a number of salient points. I noted that, if I replaced the box with another, perfect box specimen, he would get everything he wanted without our store having to throw away $20. I explained that, as a small, privately owned store, we can't really afford to take a bath on all these movies, and that we wouldn't get an automatic refund for the film as the man seemed to assume. I observed that the box rip was his own fault and that it was not our responsibility to repair or correct damage done to our products after they are sold. I requested repeatedly that the man stop shouting at me and making a scene.

It was all to no avail. So, after 10 minutes or so of this nonsense, I caved. I gave the man what he wanted so he'd go the hell away. I told him as much to his face. I added that he was being abusive, that he was taking unfair advantage of a small business, and that I personally found him to be a rather odious individual. On his way out, still in mid-tantrum, he said the following:

Now both of us are in a bad mood. I'm sorry about that.

Then he left.

What an odd thing to say. He's like The Lorax, leaving my life with a cryptic little message I have to spend the next several decades trying to decipher. (I'm aware that, in my analogy, Buster would be the "hero" and I would be the greedy capitalist, but fuck that...It's just a book/cartoon.)

Here's my interpretation: He was in a bad mood about the plastic rip-DVD situation, a surefire red flag for mental instability. If I had just done exactly as he asked in the first place, he would still be in a bad mood, but I would have been spared his fiery, but righteous, wrath. Unfortunately, I didn't do exactly as he wanted, so he had no choice but to put me in a bad mood.

This was, I'd like to repeat for the record, a grown man. I can't even think of the ways in which this violates the social code. You just don't, I repeat, you don't treat people in this manner, even if you are a customer somewhere and they are an employee. I have no idea why people think that manners and proper conduct don't have any hold in retail situations, but they do, and even if you feel someone is cheating you blindly out of a copy of Star Wars: Episode I: Why Not Just Skip to Episode III, you still don't have the right to yell at them and make a scene like a toddler.

So, I'm left with only one question...What to do about it? I'm relatively sure, without relying on the Laser Blazer database, whose security and safety from prying eyes is sacrosanct, I could find a phone number or address for Buster McDermott. I do, after all, know his full name (it's not really Buster McDermott, which is just my favorite all-purpose fictional name), even if I won't reveal such secrets to you good people on the Intar-Web.

Here's my first thought...Take a dump in a box and mail it to him. This was done on "Six Feet Under" two seasons ago by a disgruntled, abandoned son, and I have since wanted to try it for real. Imagine how beautiful a scene that would be...Your sworn enemy receives a nicely-wrapped gift box in the mail, opens it excitedly and discovers...a human turd. Beyond even the smell issue, there's always the issues of disposal. It's not exactly the kind of thing you just dump in the kitchen trash bag.

That plan does regrettably require that I take a dump in a box, and then wrap it, and activity that's nearly as unpleasant for me as it is for Buster. Also, I'd have to find some way to prevent the box from smelling too bad or getting too...um...okay this is gross. But I wouldn't want the poo bomb to be discovered prior to delivery. And it's not like I could just leave it on Buster's doorstep, ring the doorbell and run off, because he probably lives in a nice neighborhood and some neighborhood watch weirdo might see me.

And nothing in the world would be more embarrassing than being caught leaving a box full of your own feces on someone's front step. I mean, that's just strange.

So, okay, next plan. I could ring up a ton of porn under his name at the video store, and then mail all the receipts to his house and place of business. Concoct $1000, $2000 bills in overdue porn rentals and demand remittance every, oh, week or so for a few months. Sure, he could eventually prove to his loved ones and colleagues that he didn't really buy or rent all that porn, but I'd say the humiliation of the situation in the first place would pretty much make up for my anger and frustration this afternoon.

That would require me to break quite a number of video store regulations. In fact, this very article, by mere virtue of its existance, might be in violation of some video store regulations. Let me state for the record that this post is satirical, and that I really wouldn't use the Laser Blazer computer system to exact revenge on an individual over some petty argument.

So I guess it's back to poop in a box. Maybe dry ice could help preserve the unpleasantness while surpressing the smell for transport...

Walk the Line

In this article over at Ain't It Cool News, Walk the Line reviewer Capone says the following:

It’s almost impossible to fathom that just a little over a year after arguably the finest biopic made about a musician, Ray, was released that another film comes along about an equally influential player that might actually be better.

Okay, so we have very different actual opinions about the film Ray. Capone finds it to be possibly the best biographical film about a musician ever made, whereas I found it to be an almost completely intolerable, ludicrous, maudlin, predictable and souless mess. The review is scathing even by Crushed by Inertia standards, and can be read here.

But Capone is correct to compare the two films. They share a ton in common. Both are biographies focused on the rise to stardom of two icons of 20th Century American music - Ray Charles in Ray and Johnny Cash in Walk the Line. And beyond that similarity in theme, they both share a focus on the women behind-the-scenes who so influenced these men personally and creatively, and both find opportunity to include numerous classic songs by these timeless artists. Even some of the specific details of Charles' and Cash's lives overlap. Both lost brothers traumatically at a young age, and felt guilty for years afterwards. Both had absent fathers (though Charles' was actually physically absent while Cash's was just drunk, hostile and emotionally vacant). Both men battled drug addiction. And, of course, they both rose to fame and glory amidst the backdrop of classic 50's and 60's pop music.

So, considering that they share so much in common, and further considering that both Taylor Hackford's bio of Ray Charles and James Mangold's bio of Cash hew close to the classic biopic formula, how come Walk the Line is so much better than Ray? And I don't mean the movies are alike, and this one happens to be better. It's not even remotely close. Walk the Line feels as alive, vibrant, human, emotional and entertaining as Ray felt turgid and wan. It really comes down to talent, I suppose. Writers and directors can sit down with the same material and wind up with a wildly divergent final product.



Don't get me wrong...Walk the Line is hardly perfect. Mangold's film is undoubtedly built around a familiar musical biopic formula, and there are a number of scenes that feel obvious, derivative and overly cutesy. One scene in particular, in which June Carter yells at a drunken Cash that "you can't walk no line," caused me to roll my eyes clear into the back of my head. I always hate it when movies have a blatant line that references the title of a movie like that. There's a scene in one of those Star Trek Next Generation movies where they go back in time and crash-land on an Earth where proto-astronaut James Cromwell is about to introduce Earth into the galactic Federation. Anyway, he gets one look at Picard and the crew and he says..."You're all astronauts...on some kind of...Star Trek!" LAME.

Walk the Line definitely has some scenes like that, moments that just play rushed or kind of false and artificial that have to be in the movie because they're in every movie like this.

But by focusing his story on the ups and downs of one relationship in Cash's life, Mangold avoids the usual Biopic Syndrome, in which the movie feels like a clip show highlighing the best moments in the life of a celebrity. Like Milos Forman's Andy Kaufman bio, Man on the Moon. It's less like watching a movie about Andy Kaufman the Man, and more like watching a 90 minute film in which Jim Carrey recreates Kaufman's best bits. I don't really care to see Jim Carrey doing Tony Clifton. I wanted to see him inhabiting Andy Kaufman.

Walk the Line feels more like a real movie, with a cinematic story to tell. As Cash, Joaquin Phoenix gives arguably his best performance to date. He doesn't really look like Cash (he's pretty scrawny, whereas the real Cash was a more imposing presence). And though he ably sings all the songs in the movie, he doesn't really sound like Johnny Cash. That's not a knock...few do. He sounds like Johnny Cash with a bad head cold after smoking three packs of Malboros in a room with the air conditioning turned way up. But damned if he doesn't capture the spirit of Cash, or at least the spirit of this film's version of Cash.

In his best moments, he conjures a mixture of childlike innocence, snarky wit and wounded pride with a single look or gesture. His "druggie" scenes aren't over-the-top or forced. Unlike other actors who try to go big with these moments, gunning for showy Oscar-clip material, Phoenix realizes that many drunks and addicts turn inward, get real quiet and try to disappear into themselves.

And he plays off Witherspoon's June Carter marvelously. (She also sings all her own songs, and shows off her significant vocal abilities...I'm guessing she may find some work in one of these big garish unneccessary studio musicals if the Legally Blonde trilogy plans don't pan out). I like how Witherspoon sees Carter's folksy stage presence as an extension of her off-stage personality. And both actors just look natural on stage, inhabiting these two famous entertainers. You're always aware that it's Reese Witherspoon and Joaquin Phoenix, and not June Carter and Johnny Cash, but what the hell? It's a movie, right?

These two characters and their tumultuous path to love sit at the focal center of the film, but Mangold gives us glimpses of the world of 50's pop and country music as well. In the film's most buoyant, entertaining and fleet section, we follow a tour featuring Sun artists including Cash and Carter, and also Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley. In another segment, Cash violently argues with his first wife Viv (Ginnifer Goodwin) while Bob Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited" blares in the background, echoing not only Cash's devotion to the folk singer but his tendency to cover "It Ain't Me, Babe" with Carter on stage.

That's just one of the memorable musical sequences, well-shot by Mangold, who uses a lot of close-ups to effectively cover Phoenix's amateurish guitar playing and to generally make him look more like Johnny Cash. The film opens with Cash preparing to take the stage at Folsom Prison, recording the live album that would become one of the high points of his career. The Folsom performance is exceptionally recreated. It's striking, insightful, funny, intense. And, of course, as you'd expect, the music is outstanding.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith

It's impossible to talk about Mr. and Mrs. Smith without discussing one's feelings on Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. They are the entire movie. No attempt has been made to provide any level of entertainment or creativity beyond the casting of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, and the occasional dressing of the duo in sleepwear.

So, before we go any further, allow me to state the following for the record: I like Brad Pitt in certain films; he's not a terrible performer in the right role, and he tends to work with directors I find at least vaguely interesting (like Terry Gilliam or David Fincher or Steven Soderbergh). I think Angelina Jolie's a pretty terrible actress who also happens to be incredibly, stunningly attractive.



Brad looks befuddled. I, too, am befuddled by the vapid mess that is Mr. and Mrs. Smith. The ingredients are all there for, if not a good movie, at least a passably entertaining popcorn movie. Director Doug Liman helmed Swingers and the surprisingly watchable The Bourne Identity. Pitt and Jolie are beautiful people, dressed scantily and firing weapons at one another. As an added bonus, they got together in real life while making this movie. I don't know if you heard about that, but it was briefly in the newspapers this year.

And the premise is as promising as it is unoriginal:

A couple discovers after six years of marriage that they are both professional assassins, and that they are now tasked with killing one another.

That's what they call, in The Industry, a high-concept premise. It sounds like a mix between True Lies and The War of the Roses, and that's exactly what it is.

It's so high-concept, in fact, such a straightforward formula action-comedy set-up, that screenwriter Simon Kinberg didn't bother to actually write much of anything. Mr. and Mrs. Smith hits all of the beats you'd expect, it sets up scenarios and jokes and pays them off, but it's staggeringly stilted and dull. Honestly, despite starring the face that launched 1,000 copies of Vogue Magazine, the thing isn't even that sexy. One can only hope these two are hotter in real life than they are on screen in this shitkicker. Maybe they just have a mutual interest in starving orphans...

I will admit, to be fair, that the thing does pick up after a sluggish initial opening act. Liman has a fairly steady eye for action sequences, and he mercifully avoids that quick-cut blurry Ridley Scott crap that's ruining the Hollywood action film. Even though this thing ends in a bloated, explosives-heavy sequence that can be accurately described as "Bruckheimer-esque," Mr. and Mrs. Smith definitely works better as an action film than a comedy.

Occasionally, Vince Vaughn pops up as Pitt's co-assassin partner, and actually says a couple of funny lines. But otherwise, the movie just doesn't connect. I think the main characters, John and Jane Smith (Pitt and Jolie) are the main problem. Okay, fine, they are assassins. They are cold and cruel and nihilistic. That's one thing. But on top of that, they don't even care about each other until the very end of the film. Their marriage has grown stale at the opening, they're bored with one another, and so, of course, so are we. Even once the reveal has been made - they're professional killers! - their personalities don't get any more interesting.

They just don't care about anything but murder. That they eventually stop trying to kill one another and focus their bloodlust outward doesn't really make this problem any better.

Stuff About Stuffing

I went home to Irvine today, as I always do on Thanksgiving. By the time I get home, items are already being shoved into and pulled out of the oven, snacks have already been prepared, and my father is openly questioning how long he has to wait before commencing with cocktail hour. (Final verdict? 4 p.m.)

My mother refers to the hosting of the Thanksgiving meal as "entertaining," as if the neighbors, the police chief and my dad's old army buddy are dropping by at any time. In fact, it will be a tightly-knit group this year, consisting of my parents, myself, my brother Jon, his girlfriend Paula, my grandparents Sally and Bill, and my uncle's girlfriend's son, Kyle.

We spend the majority of the night watching and discussing "Curb Your Enthusiasm." I don't know if any of you saw this week's "Curb," in which Larry must pretend to be an Orthodox Jew in order to convince the head of the Kidney Consortium to move his friend Richard Lewis up the donor list. It was a hilarious episode that thankfully was this evening at 6, giving us all a chance to watch.

Also, it's my birthday on Saturday, so we did the family version of the birthday celebration. I got a cool book from my brother on the history of scientific inquiry into the origin of life on Earth. Other than that, I got money. Some of the money was earmarked for me to sign up for Sirius Satellite Radio, so I can hear Howard Stern's broadcasts starting January 9th.

A few observations:

• Money is the ultimate birthday gift. You can't return it. It's easy to wrap. And it's not something you'll never use and then feel guiltty about never using, because someone took the time to pick it out and buy it for you.
• The new $50 bill, with the off-purple trim, is realy gay. Gayer than European money, even.
• Every time my family members give me money on a special occasion, they make a big thing about putting it in my wallet immediately rather than my pocket. I keep valuables in my pocket all the time. In fact, my wallet itself is just going into a pocket anyway. So what's the big deal?

After a delicious turkey dinner, replete with two kinds of sweet potatoes, my grandfather's trademark savory stuffing and homemade pumpkin pie, I said my goodbyes, packed up my leftovers and headed out to Cypress.

My friends Dave and Matt are in town for the holiday from Santa Cruz and Brooklyn, respectively, so I wanted to swing by their house for a visit. To get there, you exit the 405 at Seal Beach Boulevard and turn right. Unfortunately, Dave tells me on the phone to turn left. I pass Leisure World, the old-folks community, which I have never passed before to my knowledge. This was my first clue that something was wrong.

My second clue came when I entered a strange residential neighborhood I'd never been to before, and all signs of Seal Beach Boulevard disappeared into the foggy night. I was lost. And not that, "Oh dang I'm lost" kind of lost, where you know as soon as you make one crucial turn you'll be back on a familiar straightaway. The kind of lost where you just know, without some outside assistance, you will be driving around in circles for the next two sessions of Congress. I'd have had an easier time finding the Well of Souls than the way back towards Dave's house.

I swallow my pride and call for help, and Dave over the phone gets me back on track. Only after driving for a few moments do I realize just how far off the proper route I had gone. I was practically back in Irvine, for crissakes. I really need one of them GPS systems, preferably one that sounds like Mr. T.

I finally arrive at Dave and Matt's just as everyone is getting ready to leave for a bar. Apparently, near Cal State Long Beach, a number of dive-y kind of bars remain open on Thanksgiving. So we head out to a place called, I believe, 3636, with a number of Dave and Matt's high school friends in tow.

The first thing I notice about 3636 is its horrible jukebox. The thing claims to be connected live to the Internet, and able to download songs upon request. The only problem is, most good songs from any listed artist aren't available on the jukebox at all, and the ones that are available cost $2. It's the first jukebox I've ever used that actively begged for money once you're trying to select songs.

SELECT ARTIST:

Neil Young

SELECT SONG -> OPTIONS: "CINAMMON GIRL" or "ARE YOU PASSIONATE" or "LOOK UP OTHER SONGS"

Look up other songs

PLEASE INSERT $3

What?

PLEASE INSERT $3

Okay, I guess...

[Lons inserts $3]

SELECT ARTIST

Neil Young

SELECT SONG -> OPTION: "CINAMMON GIRL"

Download: "Cowgirl in the Sand"

PLEASE INSERT $400,000 AND WAIT 2 HOURS

It went on and on like that.

The second thing I noticed about 3636...There's nowhere to stand without blocking the people playing pool. There are these two pool tables, but they back up right into the only area available for standing around drinking beer, kind of a crucial area in a crowded dive bar. So every time someone wants to hit the cue ball from that side of the room, everyone has to shift around where they're standing to accomodate. It becomes like a tavern-sized game of Musical Chairs, almost like that orgy scene from Eyes Wide Shut but without the costumes or sex.

That was about all I noticed about 3636, because I became involved with the jukebox, as well as drinking and a pinball game based on "The Sopranos." Not neccessarily in that order. Dave's girlfriend Sandra and I, after giving up on finding quality music on the jukebox, tried to get into a game of pool, but wound up at the tail end of a long line that included a lot of colorful local types. So, after a lot of shifting my wait to avoid fast-moving pool cues, I made my way back to the Lau's house and then home.

During my drive home, an incredibly thick fog settled into the Greater Los Angeles Area. I don't know that I've ever seen fog this heavy in all my years living in LA. Visibility was singificantly low on the 405, and the effect was only worsened by the lack of other cars and the lack of excess light coming from the darkened buildings along the road. (It was, after all, Thanksgiving Eve, and everyone was presumably home sleeping off their tryptophan.)

At around Torrance, I half debated pulling my car to the shoulder and waiting for the fog to clear. It genuinely seemed unsafe to drive in those conditions. But it was late, and I was tired, and I have leftover stuffing in the trunk of my car defrosting by the moment, so I simply forged ahead. By Culver City, the fog lifted and I was able to see again. But it was precarious there for a moment...I nearly didn't survive to see my actual birthday (which, did I mention, is this upcoming Saturday)?

Gratuitous Annual Thanksgiving Post

Some guy came in the video store the other day, and as he was leaving with his rentals, he said, "Have a happy Turkey Holocaust Day, you guys." We get morons like that in there all the damn time. It's getting to the point where I don't go 30 minutes without hearing some sort of dumbassery. Also, no one knows the alphabet. You just assume everyone knows the alphabet, but then you work at a store that requires knowledge of standard letter sequence, and you realize that this thing we call "literacy" is not so much a concrete idea as a vague categorization.

I don't really buy into the whole "it's wrong to eat turkey" idea. Or "it's wrong to eat animals." Or, "it's wrong to eat animals all the time, particularly if they have been fried and slathered in some kind of tomato-based sauce and coated with cheese made from their own vital bodily juices." I don't believe in God, but if I did believe in God, the fact that there are all these animals around that are dumber than we are, and that their flesh when cooked is delicious and provides essential proteins and nutrients, that would be pretty sound evidence to back up my case. I mean, there has to be some kind of Intelligent Designer, right? Bacon is goddamn delicious.

The folks at PETA, particularly pseudo-celebrity spokesperson Moby, respectfully disagree. They think that, and I quote, "there is no proper way to kill and cook these birds."

Really? No proper way? None at all? I mean, if I allow a turkey to live a long, healthy, contented turkey life of about 4 or 5 years, then painlessly kill it with a rifle from afar, and then serve it to my family, you're telling me that's not a proper way to kill that bird? It's a fucking bird! It doesn't know it's going to die. You know small a bird's brain is? It's so small, we actually use the concept as a term to describe being really stupid!

I agree that the conditions in which many animals live are fairly appalling. I've seen footage of slaughter-houses that has, in fact, made me briefly consider giving up meat, before ordering a double pepperoni and sausage pizza with a side of bacon cheddar potato wedges an hour later. Hey, I'm sorry. I like animals, they're cute and all, but they are incredibly tasty, and many of them go great with beer.

I will say that I am conflicted about the idea. I mean, anyone who has owned a dog will tell you that an animal doesn't need to be smart to deserve a happy life. I mean, dogs are stupid. Really stupid. But incredibly lovable. And, whatever it is that we consider to be a person's "soul," well, dogs have those too. There's life behind their eyes, they have personalities, they have memories, they feel pain...I mean, it's an animal, but you wouldn't squish it like a disgusting bug that you happened to find in your kitchen, in the exact spot you like to prepare your grilled cheese sandwiches.

Fortunately, this is not Southwest America not Southeast Asia, so in all likelihood I'll never be called on to actually squish and then consume a dog. (Sorry...cheap shot...) But pigs and cows aren't really all that different. Chickens and turkeys and ducks and, if you're a snooty blueblood New Englander or British aristocracy, quails and pheasants, I think, ought to be a gimme. Come on! Look at a chicken! It's a fucking ignoramus! You don't feel bad about eating string beans, and they have about as much personality and sense of self as a duck. Except Daffy and Donald Duck and, to a lesser extent, Huey Dewey and Louie. And Uncle Scrooge in those old Carl Banks comics.

Did you know there was once a chicken named Mike the Headless Wonder Chicken who, starting in 1945, lived for 18 months without a head? That's the kind of animal I think everyone should be able to eat guilt-free.

Vegans like quasi-celebrity Moby won't even eat fish. I mean...Please. Broccolli, fish, same shit as far as I'm concerned. Technically alive, but about as responsible to external stimuli as Hef's penis during a Viagra shortage. (Ewww...Did I really just make a Viagra joke? I think I'm gonna shut down the whole blog for a while. I've clearly run entirely out of steam.)

....

Seriously

....

A viagra joke. I swore when I started this blog that I would never make a Viagra joke.

......

Okay, this post has derailed. I'm gonna just put an end to it. Suffice it to say, I can go either way on the whole animal rights issue. I'm glad PETA is out there throwing shit at Anna Wintour. Because, let's face it, someone has to. Can we get a shot of that?



Yeah, that's the good stuff. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

The Polar Express

Unfortunately, because of the ongoing American War on Christmas, popularized in print and television by several noted Fox News assholes, the animated film Polar Express has been banned from any public screenings. This is sad because...

Wait, what? Polar Express is readily available on DVD, and will be returning to theaters this Christmas Season for a theatrical run in IMAX 3-D? But, if that were the case, it would indicate that...there isn't really a War on Christmas at all! In fact, it would indicate the exact opposite, that Christmas is openly being celebrated this year just like any other! Well, I'll never trust Fox News again!

Anyway, rather than returning The Polar Express to movie theaters where there's a chance some poor unsuspecting fool will accidentally watch it, Warner Brothers really ought to do the fair, public-minded thing and destroy the original negative and any other survivng prints. Because this isn't just an unpleasant, shrill, mindless distraction for young children. This is some sort of bizarre, unholy abomination. I know the film says it was directed by Robert Zemeckis, but just think about this...If Satan had actually directed a film, do you think he'd indicate this on the packaging? "Directed by Satan, Lord of the Underworld." Of course not. He's the goddamn King of Lies! He'd put a beloved, respected name on there, a name that was sure to secure some viewers for his mad carnival of horrors.

A name like...80's phenom Robert Zemeckis, director of beloved American classics like Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Curse your bottomless ingenuity, Lucifer!



Polar Express was created via a process called Motion Capture. This was the same technique used to animate Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films. The difference is, of course, that Gollum was just one character within a live-action film, whereas Polar Express is an animated film. So, the backgrounds are computer-generated, and live actors actually gave performances, which were then inserted into a computer and animated digitally.

The resulting effect is strange. It's clearly "not ready from prime time," in that it looks oddly artificial. The word "uncanny" gets misused all the time, so I'm loathe to ever include it in a post, but Polar Express is "uncanny" in the proper sense. The movements of the characters, in particular, are more life-like than in, say, a PIXAR film, in which the characters have the exaggerated movements of a cartoon. But the eyes...the faces...these characters, quite simply, have no souls.

Even a film like Shrek, which isn't cutting edge in 2005, manages to give its animated characters a semblance of a life, and to give their face personality. Everyone in Polar Express looks like a robot. It's fucking freaky. They have these faraway, dead eyes. Like The Night of the Living Dead Before Christmas.

So the whole film has this cold, distant tone to it. You never for a minute give yourself over to the story, or get sucked in by any sort of drama, because you can't stop looking at these eerie zombies on screen. Oh, and also because there is no drama to get sucked into. Polar Express is based on a 10 page children's book, and the book still has more depth.

Here's the story. A young boy (referred to in the credits as Hero Boy, which sounds like a good name for the First Retarded Superhero, which is easily a better idea for a movie) doesn't believe in Santa. He then gets invited on to a weird train to the North Pole, where he meets Santa. So he now believes in him. Then he takes the train home.

Oh, and they serve hot chocolate along the way. And there's a creepy bum. And everyone (everyone!) sounds like Tom Hanks.

In addition to playing The Conductor, the old guy who invites the boy on the train in the first place, Hanks plays Santa, the bum and the narrator. And considering that the narrator is telling the story of what happened to himself as a little boy, that means it's a story about a guy who invites himself on a train to the North Pole, so he can see a grim vision of himself as a bum and then meet a vision of himself dressed as Santa Claus. Christmas was never so creepy or Freudian.

I haven't even mentioned any of the worst shit about Polar Express. Here are some of the film's weakest spots, in convenient bullet form:

• Ghastly songs, many of which repeat the same few phrases over and over and over again. The first big number, called "Hot Chocolate," contains exactly one phrase - "hot chocolate" - and filled me with the urge to repeatedly give Tom Hanks second-degree burns by breaking a vat of boiling cocoa over his head. Did I mention that the film's closing-credit song is called "Believe" and is sung by Josh Groban? This is music to slit your wrists on Christmas Eve to.
• Animated Tom Hanks, dressed as a train conductor, doing a Bob Fosse dance atop a caterer's cart.
• The weird "romance" scene between the two children on the train. Bobby Z...inappropriate.
• The fetishized "elf dance" that precedes Santa's appearance. Are these elves or fucking fascists? What is Robert Zemeckis trying to say by showing these slavishly worshipful elves groveling at the feet of Tom Hanks dressed as Santa Claus? Is Santa some sort of cult leader? Does he demand this kind of supplication from his underlings? What are the penalties if an elf chooses not to participate? And finally, what's the purpose of hiring a Conductor to ship children to the North Pole in order to watch the glorification of Santa in some sort of strange photo-op? Indoctrination? Fear-mongering? Or just propaganda?
• Why are there only American children on the train? Does Santa secretly hate foreigners?
• The film's horrible, horrible message. Like many Christmas films, the movie's theme boils down to "you have to have faith in order to find the Christmas Spirit." Okay, fine, whatever...It's all puppy dogs and ice cream this time of the year, I can accept that. But unlike most Christmas films, Polar Express actively opposes curiosity and reasoning. It's the most ignorant children's movie that I have seen in a long time. In the opening scene, Hero Boy looks up "The North Pole" in the encyclopedia and discovers that the definition - a harsh, cold, desolate environment - conflicts with the mythology of Santa Claus. He reasons, then, that Santa Claus must not be real, and goes on a journey of discovery to find that Santa is real after all. Why go to such pains to discourage kids from reading and looking up information? Can't you lie to kids about Santa without slandering encyclopedias? Does it really have to be this choice between rational thought and getting presents? Really? Is that responsible, Robert Zemeckis? "It's good to be smart, but don't be too smart, or you won't get what you want for Christmas! Santa demands not just your devotion, but your blind, slack, mindless devotion, you little fucking bastard!"

Okay, so I added that last part, but still...I hate kid's movies that go out of their way to poison kids against rationality and intellectual honesty. Faith, imagination, those are important things, for sure. I'm not saying kids movies should be like "The Fountainhead" or anything, preparing them for the grim realities of life. That's what grown-up movies are for. But I do think that the message of a movie should try to avoid "hey kids, don't read books, you won't learn nothing." We've got enough ignorant assholes around here as it is, without creating another generation of them.

Just look at that...thing. The effect is not exactly what you'd call warm and inviting. Max Headroom had more human features. In fact, it looks kind of like Max Headroom, if you put a conductor's hat on him and gave him a cop moustache. Why the hell you'd do that, I don't know. But I also don't know why the hell Robert Zemeckis wants to muck about with this imperfect, half-developed animation process when all his best movies were made with regular old outdated celluloid film. So what the hell do I know?

Crushed by Inertia: Year One

It's my blogiversary. Yes, hard to believe, but true...My very first post appeared here on Crushed by Inertia one year ago today, November 21st 2004. Here's what I had to say.

Awwww...wasn't I adorable back then? Just an innocent, wide-eyed 25 year old unemployed guy from Palms. So much has changed...I'm 26 now. I work at a video store. Um...Okay, nothing else has changed. But still, it's been quite a year. I thought I'd walk you through some of my favorite moments and highlights from the first year of CBI, because I'm egomaniacal and self-aggrandizing like that.

Republican Scumbags

One thing that has remained constant here on the blog has been my distaste for the Iraq War, Fox News Channel, Republican Party in general, and President Chimpface McGee in particular.

Here was my very first political rant. Looking back, I must say, it's fairly prescient. Here's one thing I had to say at the time:

All I can do is hope he does such a foul job, without totally ruining America, that the people Bill O'Reilly so charmingly refers to as "the folks," see the folly of their ways and vote for whomever my side puts up in '08.

I was being sarcastic, but in a weird, twisted way, I got my wish. (All except for the "without totally ruining America" part). Not in my most outlandish dreams did I imagine the actual harm Bush would do to the American way of life one year ago. Hurricane Katrina alone far exceeded my expectations in terms of beurocratic ineptitude, institutional racism and callous disregard for American lives. (By the way, here's a post from the blog's second week about seeing Michael Moore speaking with John Dean at the Wadsworth Theater in Westwood).

This isn't really one of those blogs that's active in making the news. I'm far too lazy for any actual research or analysis. I see this blog as more a record of my anger and frustration with the way things in America operate. And no one frustrates me more than Billy "Falafel" O'Reilly. He's been a constant point of discussion.

Here's my reaction to his on-air fantasy about LA Times reporter Michael Kinsley being stabbed to death. Here's Bill comparing the immigration of his Irish ancestors to America with the African slave trade. Here's a post I've always liked that wonders how Billy O gets his bullshit ideas out to the average American so quickly and successfully. Here's a recent post in which I mock Bill's apparent ability to read the minds of historical figures. And, finally, here's a nice little post summarizing O'Reilly's yearly "They're Killing Christmas" bullshit.

O'Reilly's dumbass fellow Fox anchor John Gibson has even written a book on this secular "war on Christmas" nonsense. For a while, the blog featured a regular column on Gibson and the retarded things he frequently puts under his own name, in print and on the airwaves. But I would get so fired up and angry over his blatant lack of logic or reason or critical thinking skills, I had to stop writing about him. Here's Part One of the John Gibson Idiocy Watch, and here's Part Two.

Finally, while we're on the subject of Republican scumbags, I'd be remiss not to mention the sitting Scumbag-in-Chief of the U.S. Senate, Senator "Little" Ricky Santorum. Ricky was, of course, the winner of the 1st Annual Braffy Award, presented to the Worst Person Alive. (Look for this year's nominations to get going in March...I've been taking diligent notes all year, and am confident we're going to have an excellent 2006 Braffy Season).

Here is the original post nominating Santorum, the official nominations post and of course, the post in which I blogged live from the actual awards event. Finally, here's the nomination of Antonio Esfandiari, a horrible horrible man in his own right, whose idiotic column kick-started the entire Braffy Award phenomenon.

Teh R0x0rs

I haven't done nearly as many posts about music as I had initially imagined I would. I find it kind of hard to write about music on a regular basis. I just don't know enough about how music is made, and the theory behind it, to speak about it intelligently. Most of my observatiosn wind up sounding astoundingly similar. Like, "I like the drums" or "it's catchy" or "it's upbeat" or "I'd rather listen to a bone saw rip through a small child's rib cage for 12 hours on end than a single song by Sum 41."

But there have been a few notable indie rock-themed posts here on the ol' blizzog. This little piece about some great songs dealing with life in Los Angeles still ranks among my most frequently-viewed posts. Another popular post was my live-blog while watching this year's MTV Video Music Awards. Also, here I catalogued my Favorite Albums of 2004.

As for live concert reviews, I don't see as many shows as I once did, mainly out of pecuniary concerns. Here's my list of the Best Concerts I Saw in 2004. Here's my long-winded review of KROQ's Inland Invasion concert from this past summer, generously linked by the very funny and perceptive music critic Tony Pierce. Arguably the best show I've seen since starting this blog was The Decemberists at the Henry Fonda Music Box Theater in Hollywood.

Photo Shop

I don't have Photoshop on my computer, and I'm not really very good at it anyway. So I have to rely on real-life amusing pictures to give the blog any kind of multimedia effect. Fortunately, our president does a lot of goofy shit, so it's really not all that challenging. Here are a few of my favorite images from the past year:



Something about that photo just makes me laugh. Bill + Nuns = Funny!



They've changed the name of this upcoming film from Snakes on a Plane to the much more boring Flight 121. That stupid title is all the thing really had going for it, if you ask me.



That's Sacha Cohen as Kazakh reporter Borat, interrupting Pamela Anderson's pet wedding. You are good!



Everybody seemed to like this map of America, Post Election 2004. I'd like to reiterate that I had nothing to do whatsoever with its creation. I just post the shit, I don't MS Paint it together, people.



Oh, man, I seriously hate the Braffster. Seriously. A lot. So much so, that I even write anti-Braff articles for other websites.



I love this photo of "Office" star Ricky Gervais from the 80's. He looks so different, and yet so similar. It's kind of amazing.

The next two photos are responsible for an egregious amount of my blog traffic. They must pop up early on Google Image Search or something. One is late, great comic Mitch Hedberg and the other is an animated representation of Anakin Skywalker. (See if you can tell which is which!)





But more than any other subject, this blog has featured silly photos of our President making a fool of himself, his third favorite activity, after starting land wars in Asia and brush-clearing. This is the very first photo ever posted on Crushed by Inertia:



And, just to round things out, here's Bush looking like an idiot from just this past week's whirlwind tour of Asian Outbeak Steakhouses:



But That's My Life!

My Uncle always says that his favorite blog posts deal with my personal life. I'm not certain that's true for everyone. It's certainly not true for me, personally. Maybe my life sounds interesting or amusing from afar, but up close, I've got to say, it feels kind of monotonous and vaguely unsatisfying.

I've written a lot about my various dental problems over the last year, mainly caused by my addiction to caffeinated sodas. Apparently, this is worse for your teeth than holding a tuning fork against them mid-vibrate.

Other favorite subjects have included cleaning up my apartment, daily life here in Palms, some of the odd customers who come into the video store (like the infamous Porn Man, a local crazy man named Dunning and the Rudest Lady I Have Ever Met Personally), car trouble, even more car trouble, running out of gas on La Brea Boulevard, brief brushes with celebrity and placing my wallet in a washing machine. I even related, for some bizarre reason, the embarrassing tale of how I got totally drunk at an office Christmas party and tried to drive my own drunken ass home.

At the Movies

You can already check out almost all the movie articles I've written on the sidebar over there. All the reviews, my list of Favorite Directors and so on.

In fact, the single post that has brought the most eyeballs to Crushed by Inertia deals with movies. It's my Top 70 Profane, Rude or Inappropriate Movie Quotes. Thanks to mega-site Gorilla Mask picking up the article, over 10,000 people came to check out the blog in less than a week. That's about 1/6th of the total blog traffic for the entire first year! As you can see, the post has a ridiculous 91 comments. It's strange to think about, but more people have read that single blog post than anything I have written since my UCLA Daily Bruin movie reviews (and even those didn't have that much more readership.)

I also like this post about Laserdisc films that aren't available on DVD, my reconsiderations of the two Star Wars prequels (here and here) and my Favorite Films of 2004 list.

A Final Word

It's been a pretty great year, and I couldn't have done it alone.

Well, okay, I take that back. I pretty much did it alone. But I am grateful to the other members of the CBI Community, who have tipped me off to good stories and ideas for posts, commented hilariously and often and just generally supported me this past year in my effort to gain an audience for this here writing o' mine. In particular, I'd like to thank all the blogs over there on my Blogroll (Ari, Horsey, Justin, Team Random Aggression, Lindsey and Konrad and the good people of PSoTD in particular, who have been with me since just about the beginning). And my brother Jonathan, always willing to correct an oversight or provide his own thoughtful counter-opinion. And all my non-virtual friends as well, who read the blog enthusiastically and often and then mess me up by knowing all kinds of weird, intimate stuff about my life. Cory, Vineet, Nathan, Brian, John, Kaz, Jason, Matt, Tim, Chuck...you guys know who you are.

Oh, and of course, my parents and grandparents, who try not to get too angry with me when I humiliate them publicly. Everyone is always shocked when I tell them my parents and even gradnparents read my blog. What can I say? They're cool like that.

King Kong (1933)

On the fascinating documentary that comes on the new King Kong DVD, someone (I forget who) makes a comment that sums up some of the film's importance and enduring appeal. Kong isn't based on a book, or a play. It's not an adaptation of some outside story. It's an idea created purely for the screen, that could only be realized in a movie. You couldn't do it on stage, and it would be frustrting to just read about a massive gorilla destroying New York City.



That's about right. There's a purity of essence to a movie like King Kong. It's not some postmodern ironic headtrip that you have to consider carefully after four viewings whether you enjoyed it or not. It's a movie that promises to show you a lifelike giant ape, and it delivers. Years later, it's amazing to go back and watch the film and realize just how much it delivers, the impressive quality and quantity of its visuals, and the expressive, emotive "character" of Kong himself.

Most special effects movies, even big-budget Hollywood ones, tend to skimp on the actual effects. Remember that movie Reign of Fire a few years back? There's a film that promised dragons. It promised large-scale military-style aerial battles against fire-breathing monstrous dragons. And then you see the movie, and there's nothing but a few scenes of smoke-and-fog-obscured lizard-like creatures, and a whole shitload of bad acting by Matthew McConaughey. There's a ratio of maybe one cool shot of a dragon to every 100 shots of McConaughey shamelessly mugging and chewing the scenery. And that ain't a good average.

Kong, on the other hand, is a relentless adventure epic from about minute 30 on. It takes a little bit to get going, particularly if you've seen the film before and know the set-up. Daredevil filmmaker Carl Denham (played by Robert Armstrong, based on the film's co-director Merian Cooper) recruits a crew of seamen and a beautiful homeless girl (Fay Wray) to journey to the mysterious Skull Island. It's a bunch of mainly humorless exposition, but it's over relatively quickly. And around the time you get to Skull Island, and Kong enters the picture, things pick up.

Kong is probably the single greatest special effect of all time. Created by Willis O'Brien, the father of stop-motion animation. The technique he pioneered way been in the 1910's, while working for Thomas Edison, remained the favorite way to realize movie monsters until, essentially, the 1980's. It wasn't until Spielberg and Phil Tippett and the team at ILM found a way to make dinosaurs on computers that stop-motion went out of style.

Perhaps my favorite aspect of the King Kong special effects are the interaction between the animated Kong and the real objects on the set and the human actors. In one of the film's most famous scenes, Kong shakes a bunch of desperate men off of a log. It reminded me of seeing Robert Zemeckis' breakthrough blend of cel animation and live action, Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Both films manage to combine an animated character and human actors into a single shot realistically, in which they genuinely seem to interact. But the Zemeckis film came out in 1988, and Kong hit theaters way back in 1933.



The amazing thing isn't just that it's a giant ape who rather seamlessly interacts with his environment. It's that the ape is so damned human. He gives a real performance in the film. In fact, he gives a more human, emotional, charismatic performance than many of the film's human actors, particularly Bruce Cabot as John Driscoll. (He'll thankfully be played by a much better actor, Adrien Brody, in Peter Jackson's upcoming remake). O'Brien, like animation pioneer Walt Disney, had an intuitive understanding of movement and how body language and subtle gestures can translate into a lifelike personality.

(I hear from the, again, great documentary on Disc 2, that no interviews exist with O'Brien, only a few photos. At the time, studios were afraid to let out the secrets of how special effects were made, so they refused any press access to animators or the animation room at the studio, and essentially kept their special effects wizards out of the public eye).

Kong is a groundbreaking film in just about every way. I will say that, taken purely as a story, it is rather silly. I've never understood, from childhood on, why Denham would choose, of all things, to put Kong on Broadway in a theatrical performance. Surely making a movie starring the ape would be a way to expose the 8th Wonder of the World to the largest possible audience. I mean, how many people can you squeeze into a concert hall each night?

Not to mention the logistical nightmare of keeping a live audience safe from a giant caged animal. And of housing Kong somewhere in Manhattan so he could make nightly theatrical performances. Why not make a movie with Kong once, then sell access to that footage around the world for years? You could even drop him back on Skull Island once you were done with him (provided he wasn't signed by RKO Pictures to a three-picture deal, which might have resulted in a better sequel than Son of Kong).

But these are piddling little silly thoughts that merely occured to me during the movie. Overall, the thing is an unqualified triumph, a masterpiece. One of the essential films, and pretty much the greatest single special effects movie ever made. Hopefully, Peter Jackson finds some new, exciting spin on this material next month...

Is This Racist?

Here's a poem I found posted on the blog "Swanky Conservative." For the record, the name of their blog is half correct. I'll leave it to you to determine which half.

So, my question to all of you is...Is This Racist?

‘Twas the Night Before Katrina (Cajun style)

Please note that the title indicates the poem is told in a "Cajun" accent. This will become important later...

‘Twas de night before Katrina, when all tru da state
Not a gas pump was pumpin’,
Not a store open late
All da plywood was hung, on de windows wit care,
Knowing dat a hurricane, Soon would be dere.

Yes, it's a humorous poem about a storm that killed many many citizenes of New Orleans. So the poem is insensitive. But that's not why I've asked you all here...The title of this post isn't "Are Conservative Blogs Insensitive?" It's "Is This Racist?"

Let's go a bit further:

Da chilren were ready wit deir flashlight in hand
While rain bands from da hurricane covered over our lan'
And Mom wit her Mag-lite, and me wit my cap
Has jus filled da battub for flushing our crap.

Rhyming cap with crap! You devilishly clever anonymous satirist!

Anyway, do you see where I'm going with this? Sure, there's such thing as a "Cajun" accent. You may recall it being used by Gambit in that old "X-Men" cartoon, or Jean-Claude Van Damme in Hard Target. ("I weel halp you find your daddee.")

But all this "dat dere" stuff sounds more like, well, like a minstrel accent. And the overall tone of the poem, about panicky, bewildered Louisiana citizens fleeing the massive storm on foot...And the fact that the overwhelming number of Katrina refugees were black...

De wind how it howled, de storm very scary,
Myself and my family were all too unwary.
Da dangers of hurricanes are serious ya know,
Dey are taken for granted as Betsy did show.

Seriously, maybe I'm being oversensitive or something...You tell me. Is This Racist?

Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic

I've seen a lot of short movies lately. Anything under 90 minutes...In some ways, it kind of feels like a small failure. I mean, an hour and a half is basically industry standard; if you can't even get that far, maybe there are some basic structural flaws in the concept. Whenever you see a mainstream film, particularly a comedy, that comes in at 75 or 80 minutes, that's kind of a red flag.

But sometimes, a shorter movie has advantages. In just over an hour, there isn't really time for a movie to wear out its welcome. Sure, if it's bad anyway, it will still be bad, but it will never have that oppressive "long bad movie that feels like it will never end" kind of feeling. Like Meet Joe Black, a movie so bad and so long, I thought while watching it that director Martin Brest had actually invented some sort of wormhole or rip in the cosmic continuum allowing him to produce a film outside of the physical reality of time and space. Like a perpetual motion machine of Suck.

And, believe me, Sarah Silverman's swift 75 minute stand-up film, Jesus is Magic benefits from a brief running time. I know that sounds like a back-handed compliment, but it's not meant as one. It's a perfectly, um, forward-handed compliment.



The film Jesus is Magic mostly records Silverman's very funny one-woman Off-Broadway show of last year. It's mainly her intentionally offensive, frequently crude stand-up act, interspersed with brief skits and a few musical numbers.

When the film is just stand-up, it's terrific. Silverman's jokes are all pretty similar - she says something really offensive, but with a wide-eyed, innocent delivery, as if she doesn't know it's offensive. Then, she acts like she's going to reverse her offensive statement, when really she goes even further, making it more offensive.

The whole thing is built almost entirely around ironic distance. Silverman constantly threatens to remove the pretense from her set, to reveal that, though she says a lot of racist things, she's doing it to mock racism, and not to express it. But she never quite does. As I said, every time it looks like she's going to come clean, to admit her mutual respect for everyone equally, she pulls a reversal and tells another offensive joke.

At the end of the set, she says:

"I don't think it would be right to do an entire show built on stereotypes. I don't do that. I build my material off of facts. Women make 70% as much as men. Fact. Every 30 seconds, in America, a minority jumps up and down waving his arms behind a local news reporter. Fact."

That about sums up her material right there. It's all very funny, and there's just something intangibly great about seeing a very attractive female comedian who's so funny and open and crude.

But a little of it does kind of go a long way. I found myself noticing the format of Silverman's jokes, when it would probably have been better if I was too busy laughing. I bet I could make the same statement about Chris Rock jokes from "Bring the Pain" if I paid enough attention, but I never have a chance to focus on the minutae like that.

And the sketches and songs aren't really up to the level of the stand-up. An opening segment in which comics Laura Silverman (Sarah's sister) and Brian Posehn (from "Mr. Show" and, most recently, Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects) brag to Sarah about their careers, prompting her to invent Jesus is Magic on the spot, drags on and on and on to a predictable finish.

And a lot of the songs, though semi-catchy and well-sung by Silverman, aren't terribly funny. Worse, many of them just repeat jokes from her stand-up act. After we've seen her do a very amusing 5 minutes on Jewish people buying German cars, we see a song in which Silverman, dressed like a 60's go-go dancer, walks through a parking lot goofing on...a Jewish guy in a German car.

I think 20 more minutes of this or so would have been too much.

Oh, before I forget, one other small thing that bothered me, though it's not Silverman's fault. I know that she's involved romantically with Jimmy Kimmel. It's been in newspapers, I've seen them talk about it, it's out there...So when I see her doing very graphic jokes about sex with "her boyfriend," I unfortunately have to picture James Kimmel in there. It's weird. There's one joke in particular, about performing fellatio with the aid of fruit preserves, that's really disturbing when you know it's the former host of "The Man Show."

I like Sarah Silverman. I like her comedy. And, like most other male fans of stand-up comedy, I kind of have a crush on her. I'm just saying, Jesus Is Magic, though entertaining and sporadically hilarious, probably would have been better just as 75-80 minutes of stand-up. Or even an hour-long HBO special.

Three Foreign Films

Pickpocket

Robert Bresson's Pickpocket, a really haunting portrait of self-loathing and criminality from 1959, actually came out on DVD a few weeks ago. But for whatever reason (most likely forgetfulness), I never got around to actually writing up a review. But I couldn't let the occasion of the film's release on a pristine Criterion DVD just pass without saying anything.



That's amateur Martin LaSalle as Michel, the titular pickpocket, who steals out of financial desperation as well as an egomaniacal sense of entitlement. French director Bresson always made use of non-professional actors, and would famously force his actors to perform a scene repeatedly, until all emotion and meaning was drained out of the performances. He wanted blank slates, canvases onto which an audience could project their own fears, dreams, desires and neuroses.

Michel initially picks pockets for the rush, and as a personal challenge - he wants to see if he can get away with something illegal and immoral. When he does, and suffers no consequences, he soon becomes a professional, learning a great deal from veteran pickpocket Jacques (Pierre Leymarie).

In terms of narrative, the film is pretty similar to Dostoyevsky's novel "Crime and Punishment", only without the axe murder stuff. Michel makes what he sees as a rational argument for his pickpocketing (as a great intellectual and thinker, he shouldn't be forced to work for a living in some pointless job), and is eventually won over to the side of right not by reason but by the love of a good woman. In this case, it's Jeanne (Marika Green), the sensitive nieghbor of Michel's sick mother who loves him without question.

It sounds heavy, but it's not at all. The film is fast, brief and even exciting. The sequences in which teams of pickpockets descend on crowds in the subway, where Bresson's camera follows just their fast-moving hands pulling wallets and flitting them around, are like a masterclass in cinematography. Bresson captures the devious, deceptive nature of the pickpocket's movements, constantly shifting your attention away from the actual moment of theft.

And it all wraps up in one of the most beautiful, haunting final scenes in motion picture history. The last line has become a classic for international film fans, and it's only in the movie's last moment that you can truly appreciate Bresson's vision and humanity.

As a bonus, the disc includes an interview with writer/director Paul Schrader, in which he discusses Bresson's technique and influence, and a really cool clip from French TV by Pierre Leymarie (a real-life magician and pickpocket who acted in and consulted on the Bresson film).

Forbidden Games



Another brief 50's French film that packs a big emotional wallop. (Pickpocket is 75 minutes long, Forbidden Games a slightly longer 85 minutes). Rene Clement's wartime drama features two of the best child performances I have ever seen, from 5 year old Brigitte Fossey and 12 year old Georges Poujouly.

As the film opens, Paulette's parents and beloved pet dog, Jock, die after a German bombing. She finds her way to the Dolle farm, where young son Michel (Poujouly) finds her and bonds with her immediately. She comes to live with the family, passing time playing with Michel and obsessing about giving her dog a proper burial.

This is a strange film. For the most part, it's carefully observant about the way not just children but all people deal with death. They become obsessed with little details, with the notion of greiving, and with the idea that proper treatment and care, a dead person's soul can be brought to a place of peace and serenity. For Paulette, she insists that Michel build her a pet cemetary in an old mill, not just for Jock but for all animals in the area who have died. A plan to steal crosses from the actual cemetary to mark these graves is the incident that triggers the film's narrative.

But on another level, Clement sees the war as the ultimate disruption to French society and life. The opening scenes, of planes dive-bombing while families run for dear life below, reflect the tone of the entire film - a world gone mad, in which everyone is a constant target for violence, and death lurks around each corner. There isn't a scene of this film without some sort of death imagery, whether it's an owl hiding a dead mole in its nest or a family member receiving a fatal kick from an escaped war horse.

Nothing is stable, everyone is affected, and the only meaning any of this chaos has is what meaning people choose to give it. Just like Paulette and Michel's "play cemetary," there's a notion that the adults, building decorated hearses and reciting the Lord's Prayer, are merely engaging in their own form of make-believe.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance



From France in the 50's, we turn to Korea...a few years ago. This film is the first in Chan Wook-Park's Revenge Trilogy. (It's only a thematic trilogy...The movie's have nothing aside from subject matter in common.) Volume Two was the mesmerizing Oldboy, which I reviewed here with breathless enthusiasm. Volume Three, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, comes to America (hopefully) in 2006.

Both Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy feature parallel revenge stories; multiple characters, each motivated by a desire to repay a perceived gross injustice. In Oldboy, a man is imprisoned for 15 years in a motel room, and then sets out to find and kill the man responsible. In an increasingly disorienting odyssey of discovery, he learns that his imprisonment was itself revenge for an earlier crime against his jailer.

In Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, a deaf mute named Ryu (Ha-Kyun Shin) makes a deal for a black-market kidney. In exchange for an organ to match his ailing sister's blood type, he hands over not only money, but one of his own kidneys. Upon waking from the operation, he discovers the organ dealers are gone, with his money and kidney. Now, when a real donor kidney appears, he's forced to kidnap the child of a wealthy businessman (Kang-ho Song) in order to get back the money, to pay for the operation.

Naturally, the kidnapping goes awry. There are several deaths, and the businessman and mute are set on parallel revenge stories, each after the person they see as ultimately responsible for all the destruction and tragedy.

So both films deal with the inevitably unsatisfying nature of vengeance. What begins as a quest to punish others for past wrongs always turns obsessive and ultimately pointless. To kill a man is not curative; violence begets violence.

But this is where the similarities end. Oldboy is like a jolt to the system, a 2 hour theme park ride full of turnabouts, stylistic leaps, brilliant effects sequences, rapid-fire editing and action sequences. Though it's built around a "twist ending," the entire film is really one big mindfuck. Your perspective on events is continually skewed, your understanding of motivations upended.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, though equally violent in spurts, is altogether more meditative, quiet and reflective. Having a main character who's unable to speak gives Park the opportunity to focus more on visual storytelling, and even the "action" sequences move more languidly than Oldboy. If that film makes revenge appear as a chaotic nightmare of unexpected consequences, here it's a harrowing, grim march to inevitable tragedy.

Park as well infuses his twin revenge films with very different subtexts. In Oldboy, the revenge cycles around deviant sexuality. Oh Dae-Su's imprisonment, his ironic punishment and everything in between are circumstances fueled by shame. His foe doesn't want to hurt him for anything like money, or in fact, any rational reasons at all. It's a matter of personal pride, the last attempt for an unbalanced man to "set the world right."

But in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, all of the exchanges are monetary. Ryu needs money for his sister's operation, and he chooses a target based on his wealth. In both cases, the revenge follows a broken contractual agreement. The organ donors promise a kidney and don't deliver. Ryu promises a child in exchange for a ransom, and doesn't deliver. When these negotiations break down, the parties involved turn primal, seeking their retribution through any means neccessary.

By the end, when the two men finally have their face-off, neither of them even seem angry. It's more out of a sense of ritual, or duty, that the final act of violence takes place. "You know why I have to kill you," the businessman says, with a look of utter defeat. He doesn't relsih sweet revenge, but undertakes a dirty chore out of loyalty to his dead offspring, on behalf of wronged parents the world over.

Spoon at the Wiltern LG Theater

Nathan had purchased a bunch of extra tickets to the Spoon concert at the Wiltern Theater tonight, hoping to make a healthy profit on E-Bay sales after the show sold out. Well, for reasons unknown, the show never actually did sell out. Tickets were still available when he arrived in front of the theater at 7:45 to scalp his extras.

I wasn't with him, of course. Doors didn't even open until 8, and there were two opening acts, and I'll be damned if I'm going to hang around inside the Wiltern Theater drinking $6 beers for 2.5 hours waiting for Spoon to play. So he went early to sell the tickets, and I arranged to meet him at around 10, which was my guesstimate for the time Spoon would actually take the stage.

I was almost on the money. In fact, in a surprise move, the opening acts hustled on and off the stage, and Spoon went on at around 9:45. I was just arriving as they broke into their first song, "The Beast and Dragon, Adored" from their latest album, "Gimme Fiction." I made it in time to find a pretty kickass spot, off to the side but surprisingly close to the stage.

I did not have time, however, to locate Nathan. We found one another about 3 songs into Spoon's terrific 80 minute set. He was (in retrospect, predictably) hanging back by the bar. A word about Nathan: He is 12 feet tall.

Okay, maybe not 12. But well over 6. Sometimes in bars, he tells people he's 7 feet tall. On rare occasions, they believe him. I bring up his egregious height here because, at concerts, hanging out next to him can be something of a liability. I can't really forge forward through the crowd like I usually would in pursuit of a clear vantage point. You can't really cut in front of regular-sized people if you're traveling with a Giant...they get kind of irritated.

So it took a little cajoling to find a spot where I, at 5'9", could see and where Nathan, at 6'5"-ish, wasn't blocking the view of several Lollypop Guild members.

Fortunately, we were rewarded for our labors. The show was terrific. I had never seen Spoon before, and I didn't really expect them to rock out quite like they did. If you listen to their albums, they're always really clean and polished. Meticulously arranged hooky indie rock songs that are pared down, minimalist, and held together by the exceptionally tight drumming of band co-founder Jim Eno.

Spoon tore through a ton of great songs, mainly tracks from their two most recent albums, this year's "Fiction" and 2002's "Kill the Moonlight." They ended the main set with my favorite song off of "Moonlight," "Jonathan Fisk," and that album's "Small Stakes" and "The Way We Get By" were some of the most enjoyable, infectious songs of the entire set. As I said, I was impressed with the energy and intensity of the band's live performance, because the albums are so tasteful and restrained. I wouldn't go so far as to categorize the show as "loose" or "messy," but it kind of felt like seeing a really talented garage band with a killer catalog of songs. More reminiscent, in other words, of seeing The Strokes than The Decemberists.

In addition to playing almost the entire new album, Spoon did make room for a few older numbers, and some of them were the highlights of the entire set. "Car Radio" off of their underrated 1998 LP "Series of Sneaks" provided a showcase for lead singer Britt Daniel's emotive, McCartney-esque wail, and a memorable rendition of "Fitted Shirt" from 2001's "Girls Can Tell" was another high point.

All in all, a pretty terrific time. I can generally gauge the quality of an indie rock show fairly easily...If I'm tired of being at a concert and want to go home by the encore, it's a mediocre show. If the house lights come up and I find myself thinking that the band didn't play for very long, the show kicked ass. Thus far in 2005, almost all of the shows I've seen have been in this second category. Really, besides the KROQ 2005 Grim Inland Death March, I've had an exceptional year for concert-going.

Mourning Wood

I've got two things to say about this new development in the Plamegate government leak story. As anyone who reads any blogs besides this one and The Superficial knows by now, it has been revealed that a senior Bush administration official leaked the name of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post several months before Scooter Libby leaked the name to Judith Miller or Matt Cooper.

(1) As a journalism student back in high school, I idolized Woodward and Bernstein's groundbreaking work investigating the Watergate scandal. It's probably the most famous achievement in journalism of our time, due in part to the excellent film All the President's Men, in which Woodward was portrayed by Robert Redford. At that time, of course, I had little appreciation for nuance. Woodward was a hero journalist, period.

In the intervening years, I've learned enough about the guy to know that he wasn't QUITE the selfless, iconic hero of so many worshipful young reporter's fantasies. He was and always has been an establishment kind of guy. We know now that his most famous secret source, Deep Throat, was really the deputy director of the FBI, a guy more interested in centralizing power in his agency than ending corruption or government secrecy.

But it's still disheartening to see a guy like Bob Woodward become a puppet for the most shamelessly corrupt administration in American history. This sort of trade - in which a journalist basically agrees to become a PR director for a political cause in exchange for exclusive access to the leaders of that cause - is complete and total horseshit, the example opposite of the job journalists are hired to perform.

This revelation means that Woodward has known information all along, through this entire 2-year plus process, of vital importance to the public, and has kept his mouth shut. He claims reporter-source confidentiality, which is the biggest load of bull I've ever heard. Confidentiality means that you don't reveal who told you about a story if that information would compromise your source. It doesn't mean a journalist should never have to testify in a trial, or that a journalist has a right to disclose or withhold whatever information they want from the public, or certainly that a journalist can run a story they know to be biased and misleading, hiding behind a confidential insider source. Woodward, at one time or another, has implied all of these things.

And it goes beyond simply hiding important facts from the public he had promised to inform. He actively has been going around trying to downplay the entire leak investigation of Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald. Without revealing to anyone that he had any personal connection to the story whatsoever, including his own editors at the Washington Post! What a scumbag, pretending to be an impartial observer in order to cover the asses of his criminal crony friends.

(2) Just because Woodward has admitted someone leaked to him before Libby leaked to anyone else doesn't mean Libby is off the hook. My God, has everyone lost their minds?

Here's how the propaganda has been sold...If someone (possibly National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley or the Big Man himself, Vice President Dark Helmet) told a reporter about Valerie Plame before Scooter Libby, than Libby's not the real leaker and should be cleared of all charges.

Excuse me? This is the best the White House can do? One of our resident fuck-ups had already sold out that undercover agent before the resident fuck-up you've indicted. Nyah nyah nyah.

Firstly, Libby's under indictment for lying about what he knew and when he knew it, not for leaking anything, so he's still guilty as hell. Secondly, Fitzgerald had clearly indicated at Libby's indictment that he was presenting the case as he presently understood it, and that all facts might not be available to him because everyone involved in still lying. The Republicans are seriously trying to convince us that, because so many other people are still lying, we shouldn't do anything bad to the liars we've already caught. Yeah, it's a really stupid argument.

And yet, according to reliable sites like Media Matters, the press is going for it. Sigh...At least Bush's poll numbers are still in the crapper.

What's It Worth To Ya?

I don't have blogads on the site here. They're distracting, for one, and it's not like I'd make any money off of them. You need actual traffic in order to make money from having ads on your blog, and this blog has had about as much traffic this week as the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. (Too soon?)

So, basically, I've always assumed the blog here is, for all intents and purposes, worthless as a commodity. Fun to maintain, and useful for keeping contact with friends on the Intar-Web and spewing out the occasional rant, but hardly a wise business undertaking.

That was until I saw this Technocrati service, called "How Much Is Your Blog Worth?" Using some advanced, space-age formula (possibly involving algorithms or even...dare I say...logarithms?), they can determine exactly how much any blog is worth in real dollars! My result was $16,371.66.

Holy shit, can that possibly be right? That's seriously more than I will earn this year at the video store. Just for sitting here in my bedroom typing mean things about Bill O'Reilly and Michelle Malkin? And exactly who is ever going to give me, forget 16 large, $5 for Crushed By Inertia exactly?

Now there's another device for calculating blog worth, and it's somewhat more...realistic.

Using even more exciting mathematical computations, such as cosines, blogger Nic Duquette declares that my blog is worth more like $540 annually. To be honest, it still sounds a bit high. Maybe if every 50th post came with some free hardcore XXX streaming video...But I don't really have the technology for that sort of set-up. Or the capital to invest in any hardcore XXX videos. Maybe if someone would give me the $540 up front, I could go buy some pornography and finally attract some viewership.

Cause I seriously have to quit this day job. Waking up early to stand around renting people movies for 8 hours is totally five minutes ago.

Oliver Stone's W

Oh, please, Oliver Stone...Stop being such a drug-addled drunk-driving lunatic or you won't survive long enough to make a scorching biopic about our current president. Oliver Stone's W is going to kick so much ass.

You know what's fun? Think of who, in 20 or 25 years, will be old enough to play all the major roles. Gabrielle Union as Condi Rice! Kevin Spacey as Dick Cheney! Matthew McConaughey as W! Tim Roth as Scooter Libby!

I'm thinking that you've already got Nixon as a perfect template, because that situation is a lot like our current one. You've got a massively corrupt administration looking, above all, to localize power within the White House, undone by a small relatively insignificant public scandal. You've got an administration full of individuals who, at one time, were considered the Best and the Brightest, an elite group of thinkers and leaders eventually revealed to be nothing more than self-absorbed liars and cheats ready to turn on their respective offices and one another at the first sign of trouble.

And, unfortunately, it looks more and more like Bush will personally go down the Nixon route, coming mentally unglued during the collapse of his political fortunes. I'm pleased to say that I was right on top of this story way back on September 21st, when it broke in the National Enquirer, but it's now become bonafide "chatter" around Washington - George may be secretly hitting the sauce.

The Washington Times, that GOP mouthpiece owned by everyone's favorite insane Korean cult leader, Reverend Sun "Sonny" Myung Moon, is reporting that Bush is losing his shit with startling rapidity. Here's AMERICAblog with the latest (because I can't in good conscience link you to the Washington Times, a paper so foul that I would refrain from lining a cockatiel's cage with it lest it offend their delicate sensibilities):

President Bush feels betrayed by several of his most senior aides and advisors and has severely restricted access to the Oval Office, administration sources say. The president's reclusiveness in the face of relentless public scrutiny of the U.S.-led war in Iraq and White House leaks regarding CIA operative Valerie Plame has become so extreme that Mr. Bush has also reduced contact with his father, former President George H.W. Bush, administration sources said on the condition of anonymity.

Yikes. Let's not also forget that Bush turned to Jesus in order to quit drinking and drugging, and never went through any kind of professional counseling or treatment. Now, plenty of people solve their addiction problems without professional treatment (I guess), but it does mean that Bush may not have anyone knowledgable to turn to in a time of emotional crisis. Cause, I mean, you can ask yourself what Jesus would do if everyone in America found out he had been full of shit about reasons to go to war...but Jesus would probably never have encountered that situation in the first place. He's the go-to guy if you have questions about anointing people's feet with oil or lending money inside the Temple, but political maneuvering obviously wans't his forte. Cause, you know, he was executed by the state in his early mid-30's.

Seriosuly, think about this. I mean, would you want to cry on Barbara Bush's shoulder? I'd rather snuggle up with a wolverine infected with that 28 Days Later Rage disease. She exudes compassion like my asshole exhudes Chanel No. 5. In Nixon, Tricky Dick at least has Joan Allen for moral support. Who's George got? Condi Rice? Karen fucking Hughes? That idiot librarian he knocked up a couple times? Shit, Julius Caeser had a more reliable inner circle.

I kid around, but this is some seriously frightening information. What if Bush really is losing it, Nixon style. The guy is still nominally in charge of the nation. He's got 3 more years left to royally screw everything up like you wouldn't believe? I mean, I'm sure we've had a functional alcoholic as president some time in the past 200-some years. Coolidge always looked a little questionable to me...But can you imagine having a drunk, disaffected, paranoid guy running the country right now? With so much shit going on?

As I say so often here on the blog, there has never been a better time to consider the lovely Greater Vancouver Metropolitan Area. Sure, it's a little cold, and people put mayonnaise on inappropriate items. But there's relatively little chance some rummy with start a war with a random sovereign nation based on false evidence.