Pure Unadulterated Pain

This "12 Days of Christmas" parody, produced by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, may be the most blisteringly awful attempt at an Internet video meme I have ever seen. This makes that creepy Ginger Kid from NewsBusted look like George Carlin.



Okay, you didn't get through the whole thing. Naturally, I don't blame you. It's impossible to watch even a second of this video and not immediately enter a Simon Cowell impression. "I thought it was absolutely excruciating. Please, please, do the world a favor and never sing again. Actually, after giving it some thought, you'd probably be better off not speaking either. You could hurt yourself."

So, to spare you the need to sit through the whole thing (as I did, dear reader, for your benefit...), here are the 12 things "the liberals" gave to the NRSC for Christmas:

12 Senators Failing

- Here, they put photos of 12 Senators up, but it's so fast and poorly Photoshopped, you can't actually tell who they are. I picked out Kerry, and that's it. And bear in mind, I follow news and politics for a living. If I'm having trouble spotting faces, how does a person who does something non-news-media-related all day have any chance?

11 Percent Approval

- Not funny in any real way, which you'd think would be the point, but at least this one is true...sorta. The reason Congress has such a low approval rating is that they won't stand up to the Republican President, the thing they were voted into office to do only last year. But I don't want to begrudge the video this one...it's the only point they actually succeed in making.

10 Paychecks Burning

- Huh? The Democrats want to light your paycheck on fire?

90 Thousand Freezing

- This is a reference to that money that was stashed in Democratic Rep. William Jefferson's freezer. Which happened quite some time ago (in politics time, an eternity), and was only national news for a few days. In Louisiana, they'll get this joke. Otherwise, not so much. (Plus, not funny, and they have to change "9" to "90,000" just to make it fit into the song.)

No More Secret Ballots

- This is a TWOFER. It doesn't make any sense and it doesn't use an 8, which is the entire point of parodying this song! Why do a "12 Days of Christmas" riff if you're not even going to fucking bother following the format!?!!!?!?! This doesn't bother me as a liberal, but as a Weird Al fan. It's like writing a send-up of The Raven that isn't in trochaic octameter. (You know it when you hear it...)

"Once upon a midnight dreary
While I sat around in my room smoking bong loads in my underpants waiting for my Chinese food to arrive
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore..."

The effect, as they say, is lost.

700 Billion in New Spending

- This line also sucks, because they change 7 to "700 Billion" and it's so long that the singer can barely get it out in time. Also, it's kind of a weaksauce argument coming from these Republican scumbags who are wasting our tax dollars on corporate giveaways. Sometimes just losing billions at a time. For real! Just losing your money to graft and fraud!

6 Troop Funding Cuts

- The woman who sings this line sounds gravely ill, and the effect gets worse with each repetition. Also, this is incredibly disingenuous and manipulative. They're referring to attempts to end this seemingly endless, futile and bloody disaster as "troop funding cuts," as if Democrats have proposed simply abandoning wide swaths of the American soldiers in the desert with IOUs, peanut butter sandwiches and swift kicks in the ass. There have been attempts to cut off new funds to continue the war into more and more months and years. To my knowledge, no "leave 'em in the Middle East to rot whilst we move in on their wives" bills have been offered by the Democratic Congress.

Bear in mind, I don't particularly like this Democratic Congress. They're a bunch of privileged, timid, bureaucratic assholes who don't seem to give two shits about what their constituents or anyone else wants, and seem determined to fight only to maintain the status quo. But these arguments are just pathetic and dishonest in equal measure. Plus, they're delivered in song. Shrill, monotonous, nigh on unlistenable song.

Hillary's Woodstock Museum

- And here's where the song reaches maximum crapulence. It doesn't contain the 5 in "Five Golden Rings," it refers to a non-scandal that those who don't comment daily on Confederate Yankee will miss, and it's delivered in the most bleating, eardrum-shattering, hope-meltingly odious tone my ears have ever had the displeasure of encountering. This diva's final, otherworldly "Hillary's Woodstock Museum" will continue to haunt my nightmares for years to come.

The joke is, Hillary had asked for $1 million in taxpayer monies to build a Woodstock Museum in her state (not coincidentally, the state in which Woodstock occurred.) I don't actually think this is a bad idea. In fact, I'm kind of surprised there isn't already a Museum there commemorating the most famous rock concert of all time.

I mean, if some Tennessee hillbilly asked for $1 million to completely renovate and restore the Grand Ol' Opry, you think there'd be rioting in the streets or a commercial about it being such an awful idea. Probably not. (I've never been, and I don't really care about country music, but I don't think that project would be out of line either.)

The point is, this is the best Congressional Republicans can do in making their case for re-election next year. The Best They Can Do. Silly pet projects, ancient scandals, non-sequiteur (No more secret ballots? I still have no clue what they mean with that one...) and outright misrepresentations, all delivered in such an obnoxious, amateurish manner, no one could possibly sit through the whole thing, even like-minded partisans.

NOTE: They actually wrote an explanation key in the YouTube "About this Video" section, obviously figuring that viewers would be confused. But even after reading their explanation of the "No More Secret Ballots" line, I still don't know what the hell they're talking about.

(Big Labor payback for union bosses)

Huh?

4 bucks a gallon

- At least they got a four in there...I'll give them that. Still, not quite sure how this is the fault of Congressional Democrats. More like trigger-happy Republican presidents starting needless wars in the places where they keep all the oil.

Al Franken ranting

- Can't help but notice...no 3. Just sad, really. You know what, Republicans? I'm going to GIVE YOU this one...

"3 Cops a-Slapping"

You remember, how Cynthia McKinney slapped that cop around when he stopped her in the Capitol? And look, it has a 3 in it! Just like the original song!

But the best part of this line is the explanation in the sidebar:

(Angry Hollywood liberal)

Yes, I mean, who could forget Franken's classic work on "Saturday Night Live," a Hollywood institution shot every week in the heart of Los Angeles, California. (Don't believe that whole "Live, from New York..." bit. It's just more of that baffling Hollywood liberal irony.)

2 liberal Udalls

- Again, I read the news every day, all day, at work, so I'm vaguely aware that there are some guys up for Congressional seats in 2008 named Udall. I can't imagine more than 1% of Americans (and that's probably too high) are aware of this fact. They do not need to be. No one needs to be. It is, at this point, totally insignificant to everyone's life.

Was this just desperation to work a two in there? Because they obviously weren't worried about that shit when it came to 3 or 5. (Seriously, how many people do you think it took to write this song? Was it more than 1/8 of one person? Because if so, that's too many.)

Also, in case you didn't watch this (and let's face it...you couldn't have...) and forget how the original goes, 2 comes at the very very beginning, which means it's repeated 11 times. Hearing a bad joke poorly sung once kind of sucks. Hearing a bad joke poorly sung 11 times is like watching your grandmother and a litter of puppies get burned alive in a Bessemer Converter. 11 times.

And a tax hike for every family!

- As a single man, I have to tell you...I'm strongly in favor of a tax hike for most families. Fuck you all, I gots to get mine. No one's ever after my vote. Not once has a politician ever attempted to reach out to the slothful 20-something single urban male. Not once. And I could be bought...pretty easily. Way easier than these NASCAR dads, who have a list of demands a mile long and some of whom seem to love Fred Thompson, so God knows what the hell is wrong with that crowd.

But the slothful 20-something single urban male is a voter without a representative. Build me a low-cost bullet train from here to Vegas, I'm yours. Legalize it, you've got my vote for at least a decade. Stop using my money to put up billboards advising mothers to talk to their children about not having sex early and often, your ideas will intrigue me and I will subscribe to your newsletter. Pander to me for once, dammit!

Ridic

So, drop what you're doing and go to Angry Ken immediately. My friend and fellow Mahalonian, Veronica, has live-blogged last night's "Hills" finale/reunion/thing and it's absolutely fantastic. I've been telling her she needs her own blog for a long time now, and this only once again confirms my theory. Just a taste...

Frankie Delgado just walked in and the show came back on, its pretty funny each time the show starts back they make sure somebody walks on the carpet so it can look like we are yelling for them. Brody ran up to him and damn I wouldnt mind being in between those two hot pieces of ass. (Ken: Stop!)

oh yah Ken took a picture of brody and I, and it came out like shit (thats totally Ken’s fault)

Jen Bunney just walked in, and I can smell the skank from here…the nost she has is made for a 5 year old. her and miss hilton must have gone to the same plastic surgeon…also she has some gnarly bruises on her legs, somebody had a kinky night

Yes.

The Golden Compass

The Golden Compass, the first film to be made from Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy of fantasy books, feels a lot like that first "Harry Potter" film. A frightened Chris Columbus had a ridiculous amount of hype and expectation to live up to, so he carefully made sure to include as much material from the novel as humanly possible. Tell the story in exactly the same way, so as not to offend the die-hards.

It makes sense if you're adapting a juggernaut like Sorcerer's Stone, but I'm not sure Chris Weitz had to take the same tack with Pullman's books. Sure, these stories have many, many devoted fans. They're very good fantasy books - they're going to have devoted fan followings. But if the entire point is to open these stories up to a mass audience, greater liberties can be taken.



The frenzied pace kicks in immediately. We meet Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards), a presumed orphan living under the care of the faculty of Jordan College, and almost immediately, she's on the move. Even though several of her schoolyard chums will become important later on in the film, we get to know them in a flash, during a chase scene, no less. I understand that this follows roughly the plotline of the novel's first chapter, but that's a book. A single chapter's worth of prose can obviously give us more information and insight into these kids and their world than 4 minutes of action-oriented screen time.

Lyra's mysterious Uncle, the esteemed scholar Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig), has shown up and announced, controversially, that the universe is held together by dust, and that by manipulating this dust, he can visit parallel universes. He also gives Lyra a magical Golden Compass (otherwise known as an alethiometer), made with this crazy universe dust, that can answer any question truthfully provided you can understand its symbol code.

All of this flies in the face of the Doctrines of the Magisterium, a brutal authority-religion run by severe British actors Derek Jacobi and Christopher Lee. (Their Evil Staff Meeting is one of the film's best scenes, far more in line with the tone of the books than the surrounding material. Also, "Evil Staff Meeting" would be a great name for a short film, and I intend to start writing such a project immediately.)

So the Magisterium send one of their agents, Marisa Coulter (Nicole Kidman, in To Die For perky-evil mode) to get Lyra and the alethiometer. This, of course, is really just the prelude to the real story, which involves witches and armored bears and kidnapped Gyptian children and spirit-animals that follow you around and offer advice called daemons. Seriously...it's a cool book...

Unwisely, Weitz (who directed and wrote the screenplay, and whose past credits include and About a Boy and American Pie) tries to fit this entire novel's worth of characters and incidents into 2 hours. It's barely possible. So, as a consequence, the whole film feels rushed. (I can't imagine everyone involved didn't know this.)

We can't slow down to take in anything about this alternate reality universe because we've got to hustle to the next location and meet the next amazing new species. The film's not difficult to follow, as the storytelling's still quite linear, but it's too busy to build any real momentum. We don't grow to care about anyone or anything because we only have a few quick moments to get to know them.

Take the witches (please!) They come in so late in the story that Weitz has essentially run out of time. We need a big climax, and pronto. So one witch (Eva Green) floats down to visit Lyra, deliver some much-needed exposition, then flies away, to return briefly during a battle scene and then hang around at the end as if she's earned Main Character status. Who the hell are these witches? What do they care about the kidnapped children and the bears? It would be as if the elves in Lord of the Rings just showed up at the final battle in Return of the King. "Oh, hey, there's elves in Middle Earth, too! Did you see those talking trees? They're weird. Okay, let's go kill these guys!"

Sam Elliott, playing the friendly pilot who helps Lyra along her way, gets a few intensely difficult scenes to play, essentially explaining a portion of the movie to the protagonist. "Oh, hey there, little girl. Why, did you know everything you needed to know about this strange new location in which you've arrived? Shucks, you've come to the right place."

It's too bad, really, because these are good actors and you can tell they're ready to give these parts their all, but they get no time in which to establish anything but cartoon personalities. (Which is okay for Ian McKellan, who's voicing a cartoon bear.)

Dakota Blue Richards is really terrific as Lyra; some of the best scenes in the film are the early ones in which she established the young girl's headstrong, adventurous spirit. She's stubborn and, of course, brave but not precocious, though there's a slyness to her expression at times that exceeds her years. She even manages to build a reasonably believable relationship with a CG-animated bear voiced by Ian McKellan. Yet she becomes little more than a prop when all is said and done, bounced around by this tropical storm of a screenplay until she winds up floating off into the middle-distance, talking excitedly about the events we will see in the next thrilling episode.

Weitz has kept all the incident, but radically changed the tone. What is a fairly dark novel has become much lighter fare, more upbeat and humorous, which is fine. (The rating, I would guess, is for one shot of bear-related violence, and it's actually pretty unnecessary.) You can't expect this kind of big-budget holiday family fantasy film to retain all the dark edges of a weird Englishman's fiction. But if he was willing to shift the books to this degree, to turn a frequently intense, occasionally estoric series of atheist-themed novels into a mainstream, gingerly anti-authoritarian film franchise...why not trim some of the plot so you can actually make it into a real movie? A more cinematic flair, some time to let situations develop and establish relationships, would have done amazing things for this movie. As it stands, it's a decent entertainment, better than Narnia but not by enough.

If You Were a Creationist, You'd Be Homeschooled by Now

I love Creationist videos. They're my favorite type of YouTube content, barely edging out hilarious trailer remixes, Tourette's Guy and 2 Girls 1 Cup. (No link on that one...consider yourself lucky...)

In the past, I've linked to such wacky Fundie hijinks as "Moron Uses Woeful Banana Metaphor" and "Moron Confuses Evolution with Spontaneous Generation." Now, I'm pleased to present to you: "Huge Moron Confuses Evolution with Cosmology."



This one is really something special. I'm not sure a single thought expressed in this 3 minute documentary makes any logical sense or holds up to any sort of scrutiny.

I mean, you don't need to actually know anything about astronomy to know this makes no sense. A child would understand that it's completely, bafflingly wrong.

Of course, all of these videos attempting to validate Creationism by poking holes in specific scientific theories are fundamentally flawed. This video opens with a whopper of an assumption - either the universe was created by a Big Bang, or it was fashioned by an intelligent, Judeo-Christian God. Surely, there are other possibilities. Maybe the universe is just an elaborate computer program, a la The Matrix. Maybe we all exist inside a tiny particle of a wholly different universe. Perhaps the universe is actually cyclical, and it breaks down and then reforms as part of some far larger mechanism too elaborate for us to grasp.

Naturally, if you can only comprehend circumstances in this limiting, binary fashion - God or Bing Bang - you would get confused and fail to make clear, concise arguments. This way of thinking is just wrong, so it would lead to wrong conclusions. Under this method of reasoning, if you could disprove the Big Bang Theory, you would then PROVE the alternative - God. But of course, science doesn't work that way. If you disproved the Big Bang Theory, you would just move along to the next-most-reasonable hypothesis and start testing it out. You wouldn't just throw up your hands, say "God musta did it!" and get back to praying.

Most complicated answers in the world of science do not come wrapped in neat little black-and-white, this way or the other packages. It's an ongoing learning process, with each generation getting a bit smarter than the last.

This disembodied narrator just makes outlandish claim after outlandish claim, with no support for his contentions whatsoever. There's no scientific journey of discovery here; just pure authoritarianism. It's this way cause I says so! Just listen to the language:

"Since about 98% of the Sun is hydrogen or helium, Earth, Mars, Venus and Mercury should have similar compositions."

SHOULD? Who uses "should" in this way when referring to natural phenomenon. Using an innately human, frequently foolish "common sense" mechanism, yes, I can see how one would assume that the sun and the surrounding planets would have similar chemical compositions. But there's nothing scientific about that assumption...That's why it's called "common sense." It's common to all of us, even those with no background in these sorts of questions.

Someone who's a bit more educated and well-read on the subject might try to figure out why the Sun is made up of different chemicals than Mercury, hoping the answer gets us a bit closer to understanding all our fundamental questions about the nature of things.

I'm just saddened by the kind of mind that works the other way, that attempts to erase these questions out of existence by falling back on an easy answer. ("God done it!") A mind that, in fact, gets upset when others try to answer these questions, and posts videos online about how these questions should be ignored or ascribed to a childish fantasy.

I also don't find this answer any more satisfying than not having any answer at all. Why is it impossible that the universe would have formed like this, with Mercury being composed of different substances than the Sun, but a thoughtful God would have arranged things this way? Oh, some planets orbit clockwise and others counter-clockwise? That must have been God! Huh? Are we really so insecure as a species, that we need to pretend to grasp all this stuff right now? We need to make up answers to fill in every gap left by our imperfect understanding?

Also, the video says that the formation of a large gaseous planet like Jupiter poses an insurmountable obstacle for "evolutionists," which may be the silliest sentence I have ever heard, ever.

First of all, evolutionists don't really give the formation of Jupiter much thought. I'm pretty sure Darwin had absolutely nothing to say about Jupiter's formation. These guys hate Evolution so much, it's literally spilling over into every other scientific discipline.

Also, as far as I know, an observation ("Jupiter is a large, gaseous planet located relatively far from the Sun") cannot be an "insurmountable obstacle" for scientists. If an observation genuinely violates a scientific principle, and the observation can be demonstrated reliably, then the original principle will be amended. This is why you rarely meet any phrenologists. The fact that THIS HASN'T HAPPENED yet to our present understanding of the universe does not indicate that it is 100% absolutely definitely true. But it does mean it is the best theory we have at the present time.

I suppose a certain simplistic mindset can't handle that level of uncertainty, so they have to make 3 minute videos assuring all of us that uncertainty doesn't exist. But of course...it does. Fucking deal with it.

[Hat tip: Sadly, No!]

Indiana Jones and the Fiery Cartoon Background

Check out the new poster for "Indiana Jones 4," aka "Indiana Jones and the Awkward, Overlong Title."



I like it. Of course, it's by Drew Struzan, who designed all the other Indy posters, so it has a lot of nostalgia value for old-skool fans. But it's also just a cool looking image. Harrison's got kind of a weird expression on in this one, though...It's a bit too kindly, like he wants to take you out to get a nice bite to eat and catch up on how you're doing in the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, not fight Nazis or Greasers or Communist Nazi Greasers or whomever the villain's going to be this time around.

Still, I'll take it.

Going to Pink's With Orson Welles

My friend Julia loaned me this book, "Talk to Her," a collection of interviews with artists, musicians and celebrities. There's an amazing brief essay in here in which a guy who worked as Orson Welles' personal assistant for a few years in the late '70s and early '80s recalls their relationship. Highly recommended reading for any fans of Welles or just good stories about Hollywood and filmmaking.

Here's my favorite part. Welles and the narrator are going out for a bite to eat, but Welles unfortunately has no money, his wallet having been stolen from his dressing room at the "Tonight Show" earlier that evening.

"Anyhow, I told him I had 12 dollars and he said, 'Great, let's go to Pink's,' which was a cheap hot dog stand he liked. As we were driving along he suddenly asked me to pull over and said, 'I have an extra pair of pants in the truck and there's probably some money in the pockets.' He found another eight dollars and said, 'Then it's the International House of Pancakes.' We were just about to pull into the parking lot when I suddenly remembered that I'd received my first credit card in the mail that day. He was ecstatic. 'Why didn't you say so!' he said. 'That means it's Don the Beachcomer!,' which was his favorite restaurant. So we went to Don's and when we walked in everyone greeted him, he was shown to his favorite table, and they brought him his gold, engraved chopsticks, which were enshrined in a case in the middle of the room with the chopsticks of other famous people. After he ordered, he said to the waiter, 'My son here would love to have the same thing as me' - he was in a very generous, emotional mood."

The interview with Guy Maddin is really worthwhile as well. But that Welles passage seriously made me well up...I almost need a tissue here...

We Love Websites with Hawaiian-Sounding Names

Hulu is NBC and News Corp's attention to create a video website. I signed up for the beta AGES AGO and just got my invite today.

It's pretty cool. Very clear video with perfect quality sound, and they have whole episodes of stuff like "Family Guy," "30 Rock," "The Simpsons" and even "Heroes." Plus, a lot of shorts, the kind of content that gets pulled from YouTube quickly whenever anyone dares put it up. Like this:



But my favorite feature is the "Custom Clip." You can take just a portion of any video and embed only the part that you want. Which means I can do this:



That's not bad.

Compassionate Conservatism at Work

Politicians have personae, just like stand-up comedians. And though these personae sometimes resemble their true personalities (for example, George W. Bush is really a doofus who thinks he's a cowboy and Lewis Black most likely has some real-life anger issues), the two are still quite different. It's an extremely simple concept to grasp. Giving a political speech is a lot like acting or doing comedy; you're using words, gestures and body language to make people feel a certain way. You're manipulating them. If you didn't want to sway people to your line of thinking, you wouldn't be giving that speech.

Duh. Yet I feel like Americans continue to discuss political performances as if they were 100% truthful, the best and only indication of how a politician really feels.

Like, for example, Fred Thompson, who pretends to be a folksy, grandfatherly type from down South, but who is actually a wealthy corporate lobbyist and Hollywood actor.

But the one that's really irking me these days is Mike Huckabee. Sure, he's attempting to project a simple, straight-forward, compassionate persona. That's his tactic, and I'd say that he's calculated well. Coming out of four years of George "Deciderer" Bush and Dick "Fuck Yourself" Cheney, Americans are desperate for a little bit of warmth. Someone who's going to talk to us, not talk down to us.

But that doesn't mean he's actually a nice person or that he gives a shit about anyone or anything. You know what's a really reliable indication of whether or not someone is nice? Looking at the things they have already done in their lives. Past behavior's far more telling than rhetoric, even if that rhetoric is being delivered by Chuck Norris is a slightly-amusing viral video form.



So how did Mike Huckabee respond in 1992 when asked about how to deal with the AIDS crisis?

In 1992, Huckabee wrote, ''If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague.''

"It is difficult to understand the public policy towards AIDS. It is the first time in the history of civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population, and in which this deadly disease for which there is no cure is being treated as a civil rights issue instead of the true health crisis it represents."
---
"In light of the extraordinary funds already being given for AIDS research, it does not seem that additional federal spending can be justified," Huckabee wrote. "An alternative would be to request that multimillionaire celebrities, such as Elizabeth Taylor, Madonna and others who are pushing for more AIDS funding be encouraged to give out of their own personal treasuries increased amounts for AIDS research."

Nice...

The AIDS answer is always a telling one, because it was VERY politically convenient for shitbags to play on the ignorance and intolerance of homophobes before anyone knew that much about the disease.

Of course, this was already 1992, not 1982. Magic had told everyone he had HIV at this point.

Actually, this story gets even worse. Here's Huckabee, this week, responding to questions about his ludicrous 1992 statements:

At a news conference in Asheville, N.C., on Saturday, Huckabee said he wanted at the time to follow traditional medical practices used for dealing with tuberculosis and other infectious diseases.

''Medical protocol typically says that if you have a disease for which there is no cure, and you are uncertain about the transmission of it, then the first thing you do is that you quarantine or isolate carriers,'' Huckabee said.

And there you have it. It was well understood by non-rubes at this point that you could not get AIDS just by standing near an infected individual, so the tuberculosis comparison makes zero practical sense. And he made that comparison on Saturday. That's fucking today!

This New York Times article is pretty great, in that it goes beyond recording what Huckabee said and actually reports the veracity of this information. By which I mean, call him out on his bullshit. Still, I doubt something like this will dramatically impact Huckabee's narrative, which is that he's the charming, funny, warm underdog who just wants what's best for America and loves Jesus just a bit more than you do. Say, 4%.

Support the Writers!

Juno

Not many people are already bitter and disillusioned with the world at 15, but Juno MacDuff has somehow managed it, focusing her attention exclusively on the negative and working against her own happiness. The film bearing her name, Juno, opens with a sharp, caustic description of her family life in voice-over - abandoned by her mother, living with her father and his new wife, having what she will pretend is meaningless sex with a previously platonic friend on a chair in a basement. One disappointment after another.

Ironically, it's the resulting teen pregnancy, long thought to be some sort of handicap or even curse, that will turn Juno's life around. She morphs convincingly from hardened cynic who expects perfection and comes away unfulfilled to wide-eyed romantic who eagerly takes whatever path is set before her over the course of just two hours. The fact that her journey is so entertaining, and that the carefully-detailed world of Jason Reitman's film drew me in, makes it very difficult for me to rip into the movie as I otherwise might have. There were aspects of it that I found exceptionally irritating, complaints of the sort that tend overshadow the complimentary passages of my reviews.

But in the spirit of Juno, one of the few genuinely worthwhile comedies to come out of 2007 and a far far more accomplished effort than the sort of "indie" fodder with which it is being compared (read: Little Miss Sunshine), I'm going to avoid most of the bad (most of it) and just focus on the stuff that works really well.



We start with the script by Diablo Cody, a newcomer who has attracted a lot of attention because "former exotic dancer" appears on her resume. This has nothing to do with the film, mind you, but I'm legally mandated to bring it up as part of my Juno review. Now we can move on.

No matter Cody's skills at any of her prior vocations, the lady has a tremendous gift for dialogue. Juno is fiercely intelligent and more than a little mean. So much so, that in outline form, several of the film's key sequences would likely come off unrealistic. Is any 16 year old, scared pregnant girl really going to wisecrack through so many traumatic, new situations? But Cody and Page really pull it off - rather than doubt whether or not Juno would really say such things, we laugh along with her at the absurdity of her situation.

Not to get too geeky-screenwriter on you, but I really appreciated the way that characters speak differently depending on who else is present in the scene. In so many films, particularly comedies, characters develop one idiosyncratic or particular way of speaking and then adopt this style in every scene. Call it "Stiffler Syndrome." In any situation...he's still Stiffler. (Okay, except for in the American Wedding one where he purposefully changes his personality around to win over the hot-but-innocent girl, but you know what I mean.) Juno uses colorful slang with her best friend Leah (Olivia Thirlby), a wounded whine with her stepmother Bren (Allison Janney) and a chummy goofiness when hanging out with her new friend (and possible baby-adopter) Mark Loring (Jason Bateman). It's almost as if Cody actually...got to know this character while writing the film, and gave some thought to how she'd behave in a variety of different situations, rather than just trying to cram in the maximum number of sarcastic asides and dick jokes. (Though the film has many great examples of both, including a ridiculously funny exchange about boysenberry-flavored condoms.)

There's a kind of trust between Cody and her audience. She doesn't hit you over the head with much of anything. There's no grasping for meaning in the film's final half hour - it's steadily entertaining and funny throughout, proceeding logically from one event in Juno's life to the next. The themes are serious, even weighty, but presented realistically, without a lot of mawkish sentimentality or melodrama. In other words, it's sad when the situation is sad, or when Juno is sad, but not because certain types of movies need to get sad at around the 60 minute mark. This was a smart script written for a smart audience, armed with not just an intelligent, well-spoken protagonist but a whole bevy of charming, memorable characters.

Michael Cera, already beloved for his work on "Arrested Development" and in this summer's Superbad, plays yet another variation on his same shy geek, but does so with panache, like some kind of nerd savant. There's a wisdom to Paulie Bleeker, a deeper understanding of what it means to be a teenage dork, that's absent from any of the characters in Superbad. (Yes, even McLovin.) Cera finds just enough ways to tweak the persona - say, a regrettably revealing pair of running shorts - to suit whatever movie or show he's making at that time.

J.K. Simmons also plays an amalgamation of his IMDb page; Juno's Dad is no less than 70% pure J. Jonah Jameson. But when an actor does one kind of character this well, it's pretty much always a pleasure to just let them have at it. (NOTE: This rule does not apply to Al Pacino, who used to play one kind of character well but now plays greater and greater exaggerations of this character, the spark that made it fun in the first place thoroughly disappearing until you're just left with an obnoxious jackass who insists on yelling all his dialogue and flailing his arms around like Wayne and Garth during a Flashback sequence.)

Allison Janney, Jennifer Garner, Bateman, I could keep praising this cast for several thousand more words, but it's almost time to wrap this up as-is, so I'll just clump everyone else together and note that this is one of the year's best ensemble casts. I don't think I've ever really liked Jennifer Garner in anything before, but she's terrific here. Her high-strung, obsessive wannabe mother Vanessa starts out as a sitcom exaggeration but becomes the film's emotional center, around which the entire third act of the movie pivots.

What didn't I like? Well...Two things.

(1) Jason Reitman's Lack of Courage

He previously made Thank You For Smoking, which I loathed, but I now realize that this was more a function of an atrocious script/source material than Reitman's somewhat anonymous direction. He does make one mistake here that he also made in that film, and that's to not allow his characters to be unlikable, even for a little while. Both Juno and Smoking deal with protagonists who make questionable choices, but Reitman's way too demanding of our sympathy right off the bat. Early on in Juno, Reitman gives us a shot of Juno walking with the camera looking right over her head. We're getting, essentially, her perspective as she roams the school hallways, being ignored.

He repeats this shot near the end of the film, and there it's appropriate, but it arrives too early in the film. We're not ready to see the world through Juno's eyes. At first, we should think she's kind of callous and aggressive (because she is!), and then, after coming around to her perspective, learning who she is along with her, we would finally get to a place where we could see that school the way she does. Reitman doesn't let that happen, I'm guessing because he's afraid we're not going to like Juno and he won't be able to win us back.

(This may also explain the odd and out-of-place cameo by Rainn Wilson of "The Office" fame. He plays a convenience store clerk who's genuinely cruel towards a vulnerable Juno, probably as a tactic to win our sympathies for the plucky heroine right from the start. The scene feels borrowed from Ghost World, a bleak vision of a disconnected world with none of the optimism or warmth on display for the rest of this movie.)

(2) The painful soundtrack

Now, I like twee pop as much as the next guy, but this movie has way way way too many pop songs of the exact same style. It's like listening to the same excessively adorable song over and over again for 2 hours. I like the Velvet Underground's "I'm Sticking With You," which appears in the film, but ALL THE SONGS in the movie sound exactly like that and it's just way too much.

Not only did the movie's music get monotonous after a while, but it's frequently out of place. Juno and Mark share an interest in rock history. She's a huge fan of '70s punk and he makes an extremely unlikely case for 1993 as the year when rock reached perfection, but none of this music is actually heard during the movie. We get a brief snippet of Sonic Youth's cover of "Superstar," but otherwise it's Belle and Sebastian and The Moldy Peaches and some other bands that sound like Belle and Sebastian and The Moldy Peaches, strung in a somewhat haphazard fashion end-to-end.

Apparently, the idea to use Moldy Peaches songs came from Ellen Page, and she and Cera duet on “Anyone Else But You” in the film. I now never need to hear this song again, but just in case you're curious:



Those two complaints inside, I enjoyed the hell out of Juno and look forward to seeing what else Diablo Cody has in store. Though, I gotta say, I feel stupid even typing that name. Diablo Cody. Sounds like a daredevil. When she jumps Snake River Canyon on a rocket-powered skateboard while juggling flaming swords, then "Diablo Cody" might be appropriate. Mahalo tells me her real name is Brook Busey-Hunt, which I'll grant you isn't much better...

RCRD LBL SWTNSS

RCRD LBL is Peter Rojas' mp3 blog, releasing original songs from a solid roster of indie artists for free. Which pretty much works for me.

Especially if they're going to continue posting free Professor Murder songs.

And Now...Radiohead

Because they rule...

Covering New Order (yes, yes...New Order AND Joy Division, if you want to get technical):


My favorite song from "In Rainbows," "Reckoner":


RIDICULOUS version of "I Might Be Wrong":

No Country for Grumpy Old Men

Best parody mash-up title EVER! To be honest, the clip itself is kind of a letdown compared to the pure comic geniusness of the title, but it's still good enough for a Friday night:

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]