Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

Like a lot of Jerry Bruckheimer films, all three Pirates of the Caribbean movies feel bloated and overlong. In their enthusiasm to create huge, unprecedented action spectacles, the "movie events of the year," The Bruck and director Gore Verbinski concoct these bladder-pounding sensual assaults. I was tired of swashbuckling by about the halfway point of the first Pirates movie, and though I feel that it's the best of the series, the second film essentially is two hours of set-up with no payoff.

But with Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, the series completely forgets itself. It's difficult, after watching this 2 hour and 45 minute Nonsense Juggernaut, to remember anything that made the first two films enjoyable. Let me put it to you this way...This is a film designed primarily for children, but you'd need a quantum physicist, a Literature professor and a tax attorney to completely follow all of the story's twists and revelations.



So, okay, it's an effects-heavy summer adventure-comedy. Just enjoy it and stop trying to follow the dense, involved machinations of the plot. But this is exactly the problem...that's all this entry has to offer.

The entire film builds up to one immense action sequence, a naval battle between an international Pirate Army and the entire fleet of the East India Trading Company. (All three films have established the tension between the fanciful, mythological world of the pirates and the encroaching corporatism of the Real World, but this one doesn't really develop this theme significantly). This scene is pretty great, definitely on a par with the best action sequences in the whole franchise, though I'd still say the Kraken attack from Dead Man's Chest is the overall best.

Everything that comes before this battle is, essentially, pointless and unnecessary. The first half hour or so of At World's End is excruciatingly dull and nigh on incomprehensible, starting off a movie that's supposed to be a fun, goofy romp on exactly the wrong foot.

As the film opens, the motley crew from the last movie have traveled to the Exotic East looking for a map to Davey Jones' Locker, the Purgatory-ish empty world to which Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) has been banished. There's a long long long long scene in "The Locker", which looks a lot like the plain-white inside of The Matrix, in which Jack Sparrow goes insane and plays around with some CG crabs. This scene is actually painful. Nothing happens, it's not funny, it's not imaginative. I kind of wanted to leave; this just feels like they aren't trying. All of this new film's comedy just falls totally flat. The Sparrow character, which once felt like such a daring and unexpected take on the material, now comes off like a rough assemblage of quirks and affectations. And once Jack starts having visions in which tiny Jack Sparrows hang in his dreadlocks and whisper in his ear, it becomes entirely clear that Depp and Verbinski don't know where to take the character.

Once Jack n' Company return to the Real World, things pick up slightly, but not so much. It's just so plot-heavy and dense, with about 7 different quests going on at once and every character possessing conflicting motives and constantly jumping sides. There are some situations in the film that I think could be fairly described as quadruple crosses. Of course, establishing these complicated relationships requires a lot of new characters and a lot of dialogue, which is just overkill for a movie that's about ghost pirates. Chow Yun-Fat is introduced as pirate Sao Feng, and he looks great in the part, but doesn't get to do anything even remotely pirate-y. He just talks a lot (a lot!) about Calypso and the importance of the caucus of the Pirate Lords and his distaste for Jack Sparrow.

So Sao Feng, Jack, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightly, the Millionaire and his Wife and the rest try to assemble the the team of Pirate Lords (I think they have another name but don't remember or care to look it up) in the adorably-named Shipwreck Cove in order to release the goddess Calypso, who had been imprisoned in human form. This, we're told, is the only way to defeat the East India Trading Company, which wants to wipe out pirate-dom and control the seas.

And all of this sets up the climactic battle, which as I've said, works swimmingly. But it takes so long to get there, I was almost too worn out to fully enjoy the film's one compelling sequence. (As I said about the second film, I really do think the mutant crew of the Flying Dutchman ranks among the greatest CG creations of all time. A new character with the head of an eel was one of the few bright spots of this third edition.) A lot of time during the film's midsection is just wasted. We spend so much time setting up Calypso, the details of her imprisonment and her connection with Davey Jones, and then she completely disappears from the story. After the massive ordeal to assemble all these Pirate Lords, they wind up entirely sidelined from the final conflict. Even the much-discussed cameo from Keith Richards is a disappointment, a great idea upon which the movie fails to capitalize.

The Pirates series started with a great conceit. All the fun of a pirate movie but without the unpleasant raping/pillaging dynamic that might offset the Disney family-fun quotient. Just replace all the actual piracy with supernatural quests for immortality! Brilliant! But the idea's worn thin. A baroque and quite frankly uninteresting mythology and backstory overwhelms the wacky seafaring shenanigans and swordplay, and the whole movie feels like a complete slog.

San-Genius Malakar

Go watch this video. Then tell me Sanjaya Malakar isn't the greatest entertainer of our times.

You know it's true. Who are you going to put up against him. Tom Hanks? What, is he gonna do one of his patented half-assed accents or drop a couple dozen lb's? I still say the best period of that guy's whole career, the High Tom Hanks Period as I like to call it, was pre-Big, when he would co-star with John Candy and make films about idiots fixing houses or idiots joining the Peace Corps or idiots teaching dogs how to be cops. Oh, and idiots dressing up like ladies and rooming with Peter Scolari.

That's My Girl, Asshole!

Someone's been going into Craig's List "Missed Connections" threads and posting "That's my girl, asshole!" and then blogging the results. Boing Boing linked to it, and now I'm linking to them, thus filling up the dump truck that will drive through the Internet's toobz and keep this entire cybersystem running, as is my understanding...

A sample from the blog:

At the Hotdog Eating Contest??? - m4w - 24
Reply to: pers-178954624@craigslist.org
Date: 2006-07-06, 11:30AM EDT

Lost in the steamy, pushy crowd, trying to get a good view, but couldn't, because the stage was set up terribly, as if to only cater to the TV stations shooting the event.

You: short, reddish/brown shortish hair, a white tanktop, shorts... with two other guys (buyfriend(s)?)

Email me and lets talk if its you. I know this is a long shot, but you were REALLY cute.

Re: At the Hotdog Eating Contest??? - m4w - 24

That was my girlfriend, you asshole.

Re: Re: At the Hotdog Eating Contest??? - m4w - 24
From: pers-178954624@craigslist.org

suuuuuuure it was. tell me what sort of facial piercing(s) she has then...?

Most of them are like this. They write "that was my girlfriend, asshole" or some variation on that, and then the original poster wants to get all "Criminal Intent" and try to crack the case of the alleged random boyfriend.

"So...you say that the girl I have been trying to hit on, via Craiglist, is actually your girlfriend...But Forensics insists your just some anonymous person on the Internet...Answer me this...What song was she listening to on her iPod when I pretended to bump into her in a futile attempt to sniff her hair?"

Mistaken for Strangers

New video from The National off their upcoming album "The Boxer."



I think these guys are coming to LA soon. Have to look into tickets for that...

Great Moments in Conservative Humor

The day Jerry Falwell died, I wrote up a tossed-off little satirical post about how God was punishing him being a sinner. "The wages of sin is death," and all that. I ended up not publishing it because, while scanning around the Net for juicy Falwell quotes about the wages of sin, I found that several other bloggers had already had the same idea.

It was, after all, kind of an obvious joke. Falwell seized on every opportunity to use tragedy or death to make his case for a theocratic America, so it's only natural to point out the silliness of this line of reasoning when the tables are turned and the man himself dies.

That's what makes Bill O'Reilly's shocked and appalled response to Amanda Marcotte so difficult to believe. Can he be so out of touch with reality that he doesn't understand the Pandagon post in question? Jerry Falwell never once held back in mocking the dead or politicizing tragedy. He's the guy that went on TV while the World Trade Center was still smoldering and blamed feminists for terrorism! Why does he then deserve kid gloves when it's his turn to go?



Bill's headline - "Disrespecting the Dead" - could just have easily served as the title of Falwell's autobiography. This was his exact M.O.; wait until Americans were all paying attention to some big story, and then use it to make the case for the evangelical perspective. It's almost a form of homage to turn it around and use it back on him.

But worse yet, Dennis Miller's then appears on "The Factor" to concur with O'Reilly's take on the story. Now, okay, Bill O'Reilly is a half-wit, maybe he couldn't fire the proper neurons in order to comprehend Marcotte's rather simple joke. But Dennis Miller was a successful comedian for years. There's no way he didn't get it. He's just become a desperate wannabe demagogue. Think about that...a guy who once had a lucrative film, television and publishing career is now making a desperate bid to be a second-tier Sean Hannity. That's a considerable fall in just a few short years...I guess it all started with getting fired from "Monday Night Football."

Let's look at the quote that has Bill so upset:

"The gates of hell swing open and Satan welcomes his beloved son. Jerry Falwell's dead. Guess god [sic] liked the ACLU better after all."

Bill throws in that "[sic]" to point out how shocking and horrible it is that Amanda refused to capitalize the "G" in god, a silly complaint. If Marcotte doesn't believe in the Judeo-Christian "God," or even if she does believe but doesn't think the existence of a deity requires fiddling with conventional rules of grammar and written language, she is under no legal mandate to capitalize her G's. Is Bill's audience really so sensitive that a non-believers failure to capitalize their lord will actually matter? I'm afraid so...

Anyway, it's clear that Amanda's joking here. That's exactly the kind of thing Falwell would say, get it? The overheated language, the casual certainty about God's and Satan's motives, the invocation of the ACLU...This is parody.

Bill feels that it "symbolizes the hateful far left in America." Symbolizes? How so? Can one woman's humorous statement on her blog - a blog that gets a good amount of traffic, but is hardly the keystone of some large political movement - really "stand" for an entire large cutout of the American political spectrum? Of course not. What a stupid thing to say. This is just how Amanda Marcotte feels, which probably reflects how a reasonable cross-section of the small, self-contained liberal feminist blogging community feels (though I'm not sure, even, about that).

Bill goes even further to say that "this group deserves no respect." I guess he's saying that it's not worth listening to people on the left (though why he'd devote a segment of his nationally-broadcast television to say so is curious). But this kind of language has some deep implications..."No respect." Don't all of our fellow citizens deserve some measure of respect? Isn't that really the definition of a society?

Miller finds Marcotte's remark "reprehensible." Seriously...You know who else is totally out of line? This guy:



But...but...Jerry Falwell was still alive when Miller insulted him! So no harm, no foul!

I Think We Can All Agree...This Barely Qualifies As News

I'd just like to take a moment out to say that The Internet is awesome and I love it.

So, I was looking something up on Wikipedia and randomly happened to wind up at this page, a List of Phish Covers. Which reminded me of that Halloween show where Phish covered the entire Velvet Underground album "Loaded," which includes my all-time favorite VU song, "Oh! Sweet Nuthin." (Probably one of my all-time favorite songs, period.)

So I head over to YouTube and...what do you know...someone has graciously uploaded the entire show, with each song individually uploaded for maximum convenience. And here it is.



So, yeah...computers are good. That is all...

What a dichotomy!

Apparently, starting failed wars based on fraudulent "evidence," spying on your own citizenry, hiring and firing federal employees because they won't violate their professional code of ethics and punish your political opponents, defending torture, suspending habeas corpus, looking the other way in the face of massive corruption and war profiteering, repeatedly undermining and outright ignoring the actions of Congress and leaking the names of undercover agents...these things are just politics as usual for a President. But permit a handful of brown people to remain in the country if they're willing to participate in a bloated, punitive bureaucracy? IMPEACHMENT!

Wonkette has braved the Pit of Despair and returned with these absolute GEMS from the Free Republic comments. If anyone could intentionally create more hilarious ignorance than what you are about to read, he or she would possess the greatest comic mind of our time. I'll include a few of my favorites, but you should head over to Wonkette and read the whole thing, as they say:

We still have Tancredo, Hunter and Fred Thompson on our side. This bill wont go anywhere when our representatives start receiving our faxes

An angry fax campaign? Are we doing 1985 over again and no one told me?

I’m done with him on this and many other issues. I’ll never vote for him again. Illegal invaders are going to kill us all.

Well, at least they're not going to support that third Bush term I was so worried about...Also, I'd like to just pause for a moment to appreciate the fact that this anonymous person feels the phrase "illegal invaders are going to kill us all" is a worthwhile addition to a serious, sober political discussion. I mean, say what you will about our friends who have entered our border uninvited...Occasionally, they play loud polka music, often following key futbol matches or in the midst of central religious holidays...But I haven't really noticed them plotting any kind of organized campaign of mass murder. Maybe they'll get to that after they've finished providing the rest of us with food, clean homes, child care services and handsomely-manicured lawns at bargain prices.

“BUSH SUCKS” And the leftists blogs are now PROUD of this fool! What a dichotomy.

Awesome.

My husband just recently retired and we where planning on going back to Texas but we are now seriously considering Australia. It looks better and better each minute. Our kids want to leave also !!! And you are right, we have been betrayed.

Far be it from me to DEFEND the Chimp-in-Chief, but I fail to see how this is a betrayal. He has always been relatively open about his feelings towards immigrants, and Spanish-speaking peoples in particular. He has appointed our first Latino Attorney General (however long that lasts...), has delivered speeches in Spanish and has repeatedly stated that he'd like to solve our immigration "problem" (I don't think it's much of a problem, but others seem to) without mass deportation.

So it's not really much of a betrayal. He still wants to kill all the Muslims, after all.

This is what happens when you kill 40 million unborn US citizens.

Of course a compromise on the immigration issue is the direct result of Roe v. Wade. Are you blind?

Look this is what it all boils down to, these people in Washington are no different than the celebrities in hollyweird,they do not respect the rule of law or the ten commandments. These people feel they are above the law and can do as they please. And that means they can turn the United States into a third world country.Right now these Washington jackasses are NOT paying attention to Iran because they are too busy making life easier for the RICH in MEXICO.

This comment really has it all. If it weren't so long, I'd have it put on a T-shirt. (But not this T-shirt...it's perfect just as it is.)

"...these people in Washington are no different than the celebrities in hollyweird..."

This is true in many respects (though I can't believe anyone still thinks it's clever to refer to Hollywood as hollyweird). In fact, you could say that the people in Washington are no different from people anywhere, in that we are all people and act in a fairly predictable manner most of the time.

"...they do not respect the rule of law or the ten commandments..."

These are the same people, recall, that want to let George Bush violate all sorts of laws if it will help us continue not really fighting terror. But we can't break the rules even a tiny bit as part of a political compromise, oh no. That's an impeachable offense! As for the Ten Commandments thing, I would bet $1 million (if I had it) that the author of this comment does not always respect all ten of those bad boys. No one does! You're not allowed to covet anything. You know how hard it is to never covet, ever? And I'm not even talking about "your neighbor's wife, nor his ass" (which always made me laugh back in my Jew School days). Even his stuff you're not allowed to covet. What if he has a Nintendo Wii? That shit's awesome!

Also, I fail to see how providing the hope of a green card several years down the road for Mexican families who don't break the law and contribute to society violates any of the Ten Commandments. To be sporting, I'll even concede that he or she means the Christian version (the Director's Cut, if you will), and not the compromised original version, with all the unnecessary voice-over.

"These people feel they are above the law and can do as they please"

Bear in mind, he or she is talking about the President's immigration policy, not all the times he boldly stated tha the was above the law and can do as he pleases. I mean, this is not a surprise to anyone who isn't a Free Republic regular, but the fact that it took a little bit of understanding and compassion (just a teensy little itty teeny tiny bit) for these people to realize it just demonstrates how upside-down and perverted their view of the world has become. In other words, breaking the law doesn't make someone "above the law"; disagreeing with hardcore Bill-the-Butcher-style nativists does. (By the way, Gangs of New York just gets more powerful, insightful and timely every time I watch it. Modern masterpiece, deal with it.)

"And that means they can turn the United States into a third world country."

Again, we get rare insight, but it's buried under such heaping mounds of bullshit, there's no way it can be accessed. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and their corporate cronies really do want to shift America to a Third World model. (Ironically, many of the pseudo-theocratic Middle Eastern dictatorships, with their emphasis on centralized power and close collusion between the key industries, religious authorities and political leaders, provide a roadmap for where George and Dick would ideally take America.) Their agenda has been clear from the beginning: continually entrench the upper-upper-upper class in power and wealth, forcing everyone else into a state of desperate, easily-controlled near-poverty. Or, failing that, outright poverty.

But this immigration policy is not some sort of magic bullet designed to explode the heart of the American Dream. There are definite big business interests behind the decision - several influential industries rely on cheap immigrant labor to thrive. But what matters is the cumulative effect of years of Bush administration nightmare-policies, from the upper-class tax cuts and estate tax repeal onward. The GOP plan has been the same for my entire lifetime - eat away at social services from within, then wait for them to fail and use it as an example of "the failure of government."

I saw WSJ hack John Fund make this very case on Bill Maher's show tonight. He was arguing that we should essentially get rid of government services because the government can't do anything right, and then used the postal service and the DMV as examples. This is bad stand-up comedy as political rhetoric. Sure, we've all waited in obnoxious lines at the DMV, but the suggestion that this should guide one's political philosophy is complete ridiculous humiliating nonsense that the guy should be embarrassed to suggest.

America remains one of the world's wealthiest nations and the fact that we have next to no social safety net left, that we are beginning to resemble a Third World country in some significant ways (such as, oh I don't know...disaster preparedness and relief...) is a deeply important observation. But Freepers can't come to this conclusion from any other perspective than Hate. They're just smart enough to recognize George Bush for the villain he is, but they're only angry because he doesn't hate browns enough.

Right now these Washington jackasses are NOT paying attention to Iran because they are too busy making life easier for the RICH in MEXICO.

And there you go...the hate cycle is complete...Bush is bad because he's not mean enough to the Muslims and the Mexicans. One has to wonder how much more attention the Bush administration could possibly pay to Iran in order to satisfy this person. Anything short of personal 24 hour surveillance simply will not do. We gots to put a hurtin' on someone!

Ezra Klein posted a fascinating graph the other day. It depicts the amount of government-mandated vacation time in a variety of countries. Out of 21 depicted countries, including Italy, Japan, Greece, France and Australia, the only one with absolutely no state-mandated vacation time is our country, the United States. What's wrong with us? This is SO OBVIOUSLY IMPORTANT. Why? Because life sucks if you have to work all day, every day, year round. A-duh.

Seriously Creepy Shit

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for this quite frankly insane bit of business.

TinyPocketPeople produces made to order dolls, based on digital photographs that customers upload to the website. The company was founded by two parents whose youngest daughter was starting day-care. To help make her feel safe and secure, they created mini versions of themselves that she could take with her. The concept spread by word of mouth, and it turned out the dolls weren't just popular with children. Grandparents order pocket versions of their grandchildren and long distance couples order mini-me-and-yous.

Yeah, they'll make you a cheap doll with a photo of a loved one plastered on the head. For real.



If folks all over the Internet weren't swearing that it's real, I'd think this HAD to be an elaborate gag. These things cost $50. And the concept doesn't even make sense! You're supposed to miss this person less because you had their likeness attached to a cheap piece of cloth? How superficial would you have to be for that to work? I mean, don't people miss one another's companionship and personality, as opposed to simply their presence? It's like, I miss my friends who live in far-flung locations...I don't miss having something around that vaguely resembles them.

The website itself is really creepy. Photos of children hugging these dolls, caressing them, even. What a wonderful message to send that special kid in your life. "I'm too busy to spend any actual time with you, little one," the doll seems to say, "but please accept this overpriced trinket made up to resemble me, in a kind of half-assed fashion, to tide you over until some actual human companionship can be arranged by my administrative assistant or, if he is busy rolling calls, someone from the mailroom."

My one remaining question: do they have fat dolls available to resemble portly loved ones? If not, isn't that discriminatory? And if so, are there frequently cases in which the doll company is forced to make a fat person into a slender doll in order to spare someone's feelings? Is this what a tough executive decision is like at the Tiny Pocket People (creeeeeeeepy...) doll company? Because that would be pretty awesome.

I guess Billy Dee Williams was unavailable

I don't keep up with my movie gossip any more. I could have sworn the word was Ryan Phillipe playing Harvey Dent. Apparently, I was wrong...



Eckhart's a good choice. He's usually in shit films, but I like him as an actor, and he'll make a good addition to this cast. According to Ain't It Cool, other newcomers include Maggie Gylenhaal (replacing Bride of Hubbardstein Katie Holmes) are Heath Ledger as The Joker, Eric Roberts as Salvatore "The Boss" Maroni (really?) and and Nestor Carbonell from "Lost" as the Mayor of Gotham City. (Not sure which Mayor they're going to go with...)

Interesting side note...Carbonell previously played "Batmanuel" in the ridiculous live-action version of "The Tick." It's like...you know...coincidental...innit...

Kid Nationalism

When I first read the synopsis of CBS's new reality show "Kid Nation," it sounded like the greatest single idea for a TV show of all time. Abandoning 40 kids in the middle of New Mexico and telling them to construct a new society. You could just call it "Lord of the Flies," but I suppose that might cause some copyright issues, so instead "Kid Nation" would do.

Holy crap, that would be amazing. No adult intervention or supervision whatsoever, just cameramen who promise not to intervene, and let the little bastards loose on one another. It'd be like a weekly Battle Royale only REAL! Forget The Running Man...This is a much better concept.

But, no...It was not to be. I watched the preview over at CBS.com and it's really a wimp-out kiddie version of "Survivor." Kids are divided into four teams and then they compete one another for amenities and candy and blah blah blah. But because it's Kiddie Survivor, none of the kids even get voted off! They can CHOOSE to go home if they get homesick, but otherwise everyone stays. PLUS one kid gets a "gold star" worth $20,000 each episode!

Lame lame lame. Sounds like sleepaway "Double Dare." And for all the "we're letting kids build their own society!" talk, it doesn't seem like the kids really have to do much other than physical competitions to win the prizes each week. They're not exactly raising a barn or irrigating or anything. Disappointing...You came close, CBS. Better luck next year.

Terrorist Supermen Are Our Betters

There is no compelling difference between a low-budget '70s dystopian fantasy film and the Republican debate from last night. Crooks and Liars has video of the "candidates" discussing torture with Brit Hume on Fox News, and it's seriously breathtaking. Fuck those Eurasians!

Okay, so the first thing we have to talk about is Hume's patently ludicrous question. He sets up this whole ticking time bomb scenario. Suicide bombers have already attacked several public centers; hundreds are dead and thousands more are injured. One attack has been averted, and you've got the man responsible holed up in Gitmo. Do you torture him to try to stop a possible next attack?

Is this supposed to be a likely scenario? I assume Brit thinks this may actually happen, because he's taking up valuable debate time laying it out. So it's not just some idea he thought up, a "24" spec he's been working on by night, but something he can genuinely imagine going down on the streets of America during the tenure of our next President.

That's laughable. We don't really have suicide bombings in America. Ever. 9/11 happened approximately once, and those guys weren't bombers; they were suicide hijackers. Big dif. I doubt they'd try that one again, but it at least keeps us somewhat in the realm of the possible. I put it to you that Brit labeled these guys Suicide Bombers to identify them with a certain kind of terrorist (the brown kind) and not another (the hillbilly kind).

As it turns out, torture is pretty much the only issue about which John McCain can speak reasonably and credibly. I hate to put it in such an insensitive manner, but he has a rare insight into this entire controversy, and everything he said pretty much made sense to me. He mocks Brit's ridiculous question by pointing out how improbable it all is, then moves immediately into a plea for sanity. We're Americans, we don't torture people. Exactly.

The other two men in the video, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, proceed to make complete and total asses of themselves. It's humiliating. Giuliani does not waste a split-nano-second of time before moving into 9/11.

He's so one-note, it's actually kind of comical. 9/11 is seriously all he's got. (I guess running for President on a "more police brutality/less urine smell" platform didn't get past the focus groups.) It's like Tom Cruise and Scientology; no conversation can go on with Rudolph Giuliani for more than 30 seconds without seguing into 9/11.

"Hey, Rudy, you want to grab a bagel?"

"Sure. You know, there were a few moments there, when I was coordinating rescue efforts to save the lives of small adorable children, when I thought I might never again get to taste a delicious, lightly-toasted-but-still-chewy bagel drenched in cream cheese and, possibly, raspberry jam. That's a day that changed my life forever, and the lives of all New Yorkers, and every person, everywhere."

"Yeah, great. Say, I like that watch. Is that new?"

"I had to get a new watch. My old one stopped working because its tiny gears were encrusted with debris from the Second Tower. I had it on my wrist as I was pulling rare panda and koala bears out of the rubble left by those heartless terrorist maniacs whom I personally will waterboard if it means that even one 90 year old American man, a guy named Hank in Arizona, can live for two extra seconds."

"I'm not sure that's possible."

"Well, I don't have data on that. I'll get back to you."

And so forth.

Then Mitt Romney tries to top Rudy by actually speaking indecipherable nonsense. He says, to start, that he's glad the hypothetical terrorist is in Guantanamo Bay as opposed to here in America, which strikes me as a very odd thing to say. Don't we sort of accept that there are dangerous men here in America, in prisons, without getting all bent out of shape over it? I mean, is Romney really suggesting we're all safer because the fictional terrorist is in Cuba as opposed to Leavenworth? Charlie Manson's here in America, we've managed to keep an eye on him alright. Ditto the Unabomber, Eric Rudolph, the BTK Killer, Sirhan Sirhan and Paris Hilton.

As if this weren't a strange enough starting-off point at a political debate ("I propose we immediately send all made-up bad people away!"), Romney then launches into a diatribe about how we should "Double Guantanamo".

Watch the video! He says, "A lot of people" - Wussocrats - "want to close Guantanamo. I say, double Guantanamo!"

What does that even mean? Is Guantanamo overcrowded? It's a huge naval base and they're only holding a few hundred guys in there. There were three camps, but then they closed Camp X-Ray, so now there are two. Is Romney saying we should re-open X-Ray and then open another one, for good measure? Just to show 'em.

This is politics as Monty Python sketch.

"I say, we send all terrorists to Guantanamo for torture!"

"I say, we send them to...DOUBLE GUANTANAMO!"

[Everyone begins muttering to one another - "Double Guantanamo," "double guantanamo," "double GUANTANAMO?"]



If only a guy in chain mail would come up and clobber these guys over the head with a rubber chicken...

Great Moments in Conservative Humor

And perhaps a new contest? Can any of you actually watch this entire clip? Try. I tried really hard to watch this entire 9 minute sample of Fox's "1/2 Hour News Hour." After about four minutes, I had to shut it off.

"The 1/2 Hour News Hour" is like a David Cronenberg film. You don't just watch it; instead, it becomes a part of you. The bad comedy is in my head! Dear God, grab that power drill and jam it into my eyeball! Anything to rid me of Kurt McNally's sub-SportsCenter post-Kilborn nasally smug-drone!



Seriously, Roger Ailes, I know you think you can get away with showing anything because your audience is made up exclusively of jerks who watch Fox News to pisses off imaginary hippies and 90 year olds Montanans who aren't aware that such a thing as a television has been invented, let alone that they own one and it's tuned to Fox News. But you've got to cancel this show. This thing is a trainwreck by Fox News standards. You guys pay John Gibson and I'm telling you that your decision to air "The 1/2 Hour News Hour" is considerably worse!

You could hire Colin Quinn and Jimmy Fallon to host the real NBC Nightly News and it would reflect a saner managerial philosophy than going forward with this "Daily Show" rip-off experiment one minute longer.

It's not even conservative! That opening sketch has no political perspective, really, other than making light of both the Duke Rape Case and the Imus controversy. (I thought conservatives were still upset about the Duke thing, though, because it's just another example of how white men can't get a break in this society...)

One afternoon, when I was a junior or senior in high school, I got a ride from my mother with my little brother and his friend in the backseat. (I want to say the friend's name was Nate, but it could have been Nick...I'm pretty sure it was either Nick or Nate.) Anyway, they were babbling on about some kind of silly bullshit. They were middle-school students at the time.

I'm sure any adult human being on this planet would have found their conversation inane, but for some reason, the level of inanity really started to piss me off. I was getting visibly upset that they were being so loud and boisterous and nonsensical back there, to the point that my mother had to remind me that they were just kids, and that I too sounded really stupid when I was in middle school with friends in the backseat.

That's the kind of irritation I feel when I view these "1/2 Hour Comedy Hour" clips. It has very little to do with my regular disdain for Fox News. These clips aren't genuinely offensive. That would be interesting. Rush Limbaugh's "Barack the Magic Negro" song was genuinely offensive, which is why I wrote a blog post about how he's a racist asshole. Pretty much everything Glenn Beck has ever said is offensive. (Yes, I know, he's on CNN, but bear with me here...)

Jokes about Mexican protesters enjoying the zesty flavor of pepper spray and female-on-male sexual harassment may not entirely appropriate, but they're not inherently offensive. They're just fucking stupid.

This is 9 minutes of pure pain. I defy you to watch the whole thing.

Netflix Prix

Lately, I've noticed that Netflix seems to be running out of movies. 18 movies of the 66 total in my queue are currently listed as unavailable. Out of those, a full third - six movies - are flagged "Very Long Wait," which usually means I will not get them for at least 3 weeks to a month. If ever. (Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner has been marked "Very Long Wait" since it first came out over a month ago, so I've pretty much given up hope.)

When I first joined back in January, there would occasionally be "Very Long Wait"-listed movies, but it was rare, and if I moved that film into the #1 spot in the Queue, often they'd surprise me with it anyway in spite of the wait-list warning. So I just chalked up my bad luck lately to some kind of Netflix oversight (say, they didn't order enough copies and were slow getting around to beefing up the catalog) or a regrettable confluence with the Netflix zeitgeist, my trying to rent the same movies as everyone else at the same time.

But, no. Today, I found out that Netflix manipulates what films they send to maintain a healthy profit. If you return movies too briskly, you are penalized. Frequently, they will send you the less popular films on your queue and flag popular titles for infrequent or new renters. So I'll get When a Woman Ascends the Stairs and Zizek: The Reality of the Virtual because no one else in LA gives a shit, but have no shot at Deja Vu, Breaking and Entering or Smokin' Aces any time soon because that's what all the other local dipshits want to watch.

(Oddly, the classic Horatio Hornblower has been wait-listed for me for a very long time. Is that really a hotly-desired item? I mean, it stars Gregory Peck, who has his fans, but that's still surprising to me that any non-Casablanca classic film would build up that level of interest.)

Even worse than ginning the system, which I naturally until now assumed was first-come first-serve, sometimes Netflix will apparently put off replacing your movie for an extra day or two if they feel you're renting too much! MSNBC reported on this in February of 2006, but I had no idea:

Los Gatos, Calif.-based Netflix didn't publicly acknowledge it differentiates among customers until revising its "terms of use" in January 2005 — four months after a San Francisco subscriber filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that the company had deceptively promised one-day delivery of most DVDs.

"In determining priority for shipping and inventory allocation, we give priority to those members who receive the fewest DVDs through our service," Netflix's revised policy now reads. The statement specifically warns that heavy renters are more likely to encounter shipping delays and less likely to immediately be sent their top choices.

So there's a good reason to read your Terms of Service when you join Netflix, I guess. I was just anxious to get them to start mailing me movies, because I had recently been banned from a video store.

The thing is, Netflix is still a really good deal, and I wouldn't even mind that much if they charged me an extra few dollars a month to opt out of this system. They have plans under which I could get four or five movies at a time instead of the three I now receive (for about $18 a month), but I'd imagine these optimizing users are just stuck back in the same system. If you exceed Netflix's "suggested rental amount per week" of mystery, you stop getting the movies you want when you want them. I'd have When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, Zizek: The Reality of the Virtual, The Devil Rides Out, Mr. Moto's Gamble AND The Fearless Avenger, but still no Deja Vu or Smokin' Aces, which would go to new users or users with social lives.

Why not a "preferred" program or something? An extra $20 a year, and I get put to the front of the line when there's a rental conflict between me and another user? I'd have fewer movies at a time for the same price, but I'd be guaranteed to get the ones I want.

Anyway, it just sucks that Netflix has found an excuse to mistreat their best customers. High-volume renters aren't the most profitable customers for Netflix, but there wouldn't be a Netflix if there weren't massive nerds like myself who want to watch 10-12 rented movies in a week. There wouldn't even be an Internet without those kinds of people, let alone a way to use it to rent movies.

Really, their shady practices bother me so much because I can't possibly imagine canceling Netflix. It's great. I love managing my queue, spending time on Sundays browsing through the upcoming new releases, and coming home at the end of the day to find movies in my mailbox.

I've been running through the second season of "Twin Peaks" on DVD lately, and I feel that, for TV, the Netflix timing is perfect. I finish a disc, return it, and at nearly the precise moment I'm ready to watch the next four episodes, the replacement disc arrives in the mail.

This is, frankly, one aspect of video rental that has always sucked at Fleshworld stores. You don't want to rent an entire series at once, because you'd have to watch it all in two or three days. So you get maybe the first disc or two, but this is of course a huge gamble. You very well may get sucked into the show, and then return the discs to find that the next sequential episodes have been rented. Frustrating.

I was going to buy The Peaks 2.0 (I have the first-season box), but having watched most of it this past week, I'll most likely hold off. There are some really terrific episodes here, but Season 2 is a pretty sizable step down from the stellar Season 1, and at about the halfway point - when the Laura Palmer story ends - the show runs out of steam completely.

It's weird. You can kind of feel the whole series just come to an abrupt, screeching halt. Every episode occurs on consecutive days (the entire first season happens within the span of a little more than a week) until halfway through Season 2, when we get a sudden 3-day time jump. Even though it's only been about 10 episodes, this feels like the natural end of the show. Palmer's murderer is discovered, Cooper's job in the strange little town is completed and even most of the subplots have been brought to some kind of resolution.

Inexplicably, after a few awkward segue scenes introducing the notion of a shadowy Black Lodge and Cooper's angry former partner Windom Earle, the show presses on for another half-season. David Lynch has admitted that there was no need to keep the thing going after the mystery at its core was solved. It's still interesting, as a fan, to watch these episodes, but I can't see returning to them again and again. Everything turned kind of jokey and pointless after a while. It was brilliant while it lasted, though.

I also have to say, I love the ease with which you can pull up your rental history. It's sometimes difficult to recall everything I've seen lately. Now that I'm actually looking at what I've screened in the last month, I see that I'm terribly backlogged on reviews I meant to write for the site. Thieves Like Us was amazing, I finally saw Dreamgirls, I revisited George Roy Hill's Slaughterhouse Five, the insanely bleak Japanese war film Fires on the Plain, The Naked City, Sydney Pollack's unwatchable and misleadingly-titled The Yakuza...On second thought, never mind...I'm never looking in here again. That's like 2 weeks work if I'm ever going to catch up.

Ottoman Empire

Has everyone on the Internets seen this video by now? If not, prepare to have your ass blown out by 10 tons of sheer hilarity.



Any further comment would be superfluous.

At Midnight He'll Take Your Soul

Neil Gaiman has posted some photos of Alan Moore's wedding. They are somewhat frightening.



On a totally unrelated note, if Vincent Schiavelli had played Gandalf, those Lord of the Rings movies would have been way different.

Friday Night Nostalgia Blogging

Matt Yglesias posted classic '90s video "Bitter Sweet Symphony," and it got me to thinking about other iconic rock songs of that era. Nothing really screams mid-'90s to me more than this Nick Cave classic, which actually popped up on the soundtrack to classic '90s film Scream. I give you, "Red Right Hand":

Genius...

Zach Galifianakis, you slay me...

The Fustest with the Mostest?

The Republicans are now at the point of actually whining publicly for war. They got their way for about six years and had a grand old time starting two unwinnable, grisly Middle Eastern wars and decimating what remained of America's middle class. But the country has started to turn away from them a bit, their rival party is threatening to actually force an end to the infinite war they worked so hard to start, and things have gone downhill quickly.

Rudy Giuliani is out there debasing himself, making thinly-veiled Gangland-style threats against citizens who may consider voting Democratic. (As a prosecutor, Giuliani used to go after mobsters, and if movies have taught me anything, it's that legal practicioners who spend too long around the criminal element eventually become seduced by the mystique and power.) "Look, I'm not trying to threaten you or nothing, but if you vote for one of those other guys...I can't be responsible for unfortunate accidents that may happen to befall your person or place of residence, you know what I'm saying? Fuhgeddaboutit."

Now, some asshat hauls out the above quote on the floor of the goddamn House of Representatives! Seriously!

On Monday, Rep. Ted Poe took to the House floor to discuss foreign policy matters. To make a point, the Texas Republican invoked the words of Civil War Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest: “Git thar fustest with the mostest.”

Oh, yeah, and one little note about famed Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest...

The quotation got some floor watchers’ attention pretty quickly. Forrest is a controversial figure who was one of the Klan’s first grand wizards. Although the Civil War hero (if you were a Confederate, that is) ultimately abandoned the Klan for its violent tactics, he continues to kick up dust.

Roll Call here refers to the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux fucking Klan as a "controversial figure." I'm not sure that's really the word for one of the Founding Fathers of a universally loathed and constantly ridiculed hate group. David Duke and Daniel Carver aside, there really aren't that many people left who will openly and fervently pro-KKK position. And with good cause! Doesn't that then bring an end to the group's "controversy" and kickstart its "infamy"?

Anyway, a lot of liberals online have noticed...hey, that's odd...A Republican in 2007 just quoted the first Grand Wizard of the KKK on the House floor. Carpetbagger Report went so far as to look up the actual quote and discover that Ted Poe misquoted the first Grand Wizard of the KKK.

And, just as an aside, the quote Poe used was wrong.

[A]ccording to historians, Forrest didn’t really say the line that’s so often attributed to him. “Do not, under any circumstances whatever, quote Forrest as saying ‘fustest’ and ‘mostest’,” Civil War scholar Bruce Catton wrote in his 1971 book, “The Civil War.” Catton wrote that Forrest actually believed the essence of strategy — and the proper quote — was “to git thar fust with the most men.”

What’s worse than quoting the founder of the KKK on the House floor? Quoting him incorrectly.

Nice!

I think, amusing though it may be, focusing on the origin of the quote "fustest with the mostest" misses the point entirely. Yes, Ted Poe is a complete moron who doesn't realize that he should not idolize America's Noteworthy Racists just because they totally have the most kickass trading cards.

But in principle, there's nothing wrong with quoting a known racist on the subject of military tactics. We can't possibly be held responsible for all the beliefs of individuals who may have said something quoteworthy or done something important. Anyone citing Nathan Forrest on the subject of race relations or modernization would be completely wrong-headed, but the guy was regarded highly as a general.

No, I don't really care that the guy quoted a notorious, significant racist from America's past (which is saying something, because our history is chock full of ordinary, unremarkable racists!) Instead, I think we're all missing the significance of this event.

Shockingly, on this issue, I agree with right-wing hack Captain Ed:

It's more than a little ridiculous to say that using this quote indicates some kind of support for the KKK. It's an anecdote used by people to talk about military strategy, as Poe clearly did, instead of some invocation of racism. It's not particularly bright of Poe to quote Forrest -- especially since the quote is essentially meaningless as well as fabricated -- but discussing Forrest's military acumen (which was considerable) doesn't mean people support the Klan, a point that is rather obvious when considering authors such as Catton who catalogued Forrest's strategic thinking.

For instance, do lawyers who reference Hugo Black support the Klan as well? If not, why not? Poe referenced Forrest's military strategy, not his views on race. Referencing Black's viewpoint on law should also then connect to his activities in the Klan ... right? That's the Carpetbagger standard.

In what is surely a career-first, Ed is exactly right on this count. The Carpetbagger here sets a standard no one could keep to - taking personal responsibility for any fool thing a person you're quoting may have done or said.

However, as is his trademark, Ed still manages to be sort of wrong, because he refers to Poe's remarks as "not particularly bright" when it fact they are "nonsensical to a degree that is, for an elected official serving in the United States government, pathetic." Poe reaches back into the Civil War era for a citation that essentially translates from Dumbfuckistani into "whoever gets more troops and more guns quickly wins."

Ooooohhhh, brilliant insight, Herodotus. I'll just forward that urgent memo to Petraeus and I'm sure he'll get right on it.

The point, folks, is not that a racist made up this quote, but that it's meaningless and it's the best these guys can do at this point. He's saying that we have to remain in this war indefinitely even though we're clearly losing, and when the opposition questions this bold statement, the response is "well, we should just focus on getting the most people there with the most guns quickly, even though it's already more than 4 years after-the-fact, and then we won't have to give like you cheese-eating Surrender-crats want to."

That argument's thinner than Flint Marko's character arc. And that's what's insane. That anyone would have the temerity to stand up in the midst of America's greatest foreign policy blunder EVER, in front of his colleagues and a national television audience (well, alright, C-SPAN) and announce that we have to stay in Iraq because iffin' you dun't get thar furst then, well suh, you're enemys might up and git thar befores you does and then you cain't vury well have no shot at winnin' that thar war, now can ye? I don't care if he quotes Cardinal motherfucking Richelieu on the floor of the House - it's the grasping-at-straws Fantasyland spectacle of grown men and women literally begging the American people to prolong a senseless war that I find so distasteful.

Great Moments in Conservative Humor

Wow...I don't even know what to say about this Weekly Standard "parody" piece. It's such a miserable, disgusting failure in the Humor Department, I actually kind of feel bad for the editorial board of the Weekly Standard. It's not so much that I'm embarrassed for them, because anyone who would publish this thing is clearly beyond shame. No, it's more a feeling of pity, really. Somewhere out there, someone thought this thing was funny. And not just funny, but funny enough to warrant publication in an actual old-fashioned paper magazine. Not a blog! The kind of thing that actually costs money to produce!

It's a response to former NJ Gov. Jim McGreevey's decision to enter the priesthood. McGreevey, of course, resigned from office and then admitted to having a homosexual affair with a staffer. Get it? He's a ghey and he wants to enter the priesthood! Because there certainly aren't any priests who like boys! What a ridiculous notion.

Already a thin premise for a joke, no? I'm not sure if Episcopalian priests have to maintain a celibate lifestyle (I'm assuming not), but regardless, it's not like your personal sexual preferences have a lot to do with the job description. As long as you generally look down on it, that is.

But even so, gay priests are hardly the far-out stuff of comic fantasy. Rather, they're an everyday reality. And I'm not just talking about the Diddler Priests! There are plenty of non-pedophile gay guys who become priests, just like there are gay men in every conceivable occupation. (Yes, gay mechanics! And construction workers! Get the fuck over it!)

But, okay, we're talking about The Weekly Standard here, not The Onion. Got to lower one's standards from the beginning. Still, they managed to underwhelm.

The joke is, McGreevey is a gayer and thus woefully inappropriate for the priesthood (that's TWS' take, not mine). So let's think up a lot of other, similarly "inappropriate" situations.

Idi Amin Enrolls in Culinary Class
Former Ugandan Strongman Wants to 'Humanize Cooking'

Believe it or not, they're actually leading with the A material. Idi Amin-cannibal jokes. Hi-larious.

The comic premise here is actually sort of difficult to discern. Idi Amin enrolling in a cooking class is certainly inappropriate. He's a mass murderer, so it would be morally improper for him to have a lot of free, liesure, enjoyment time to take a cooking class. What's more, he is rumored to have eaten people, and I suppose a cooking class could theoretically give him ideas on how to make humans more appealing and flavorful. But still...a long way to go for a joke. It does manage to shit on equate homosexuality with cannibalism (Idi Amin eating people and Jim McGreevey fucking dudes are roughly comparable negative qualities in the joke).

But there's no direct connection. Idi Amin enrolling in a cooking class isn't really anything like Jim McGreevey going to seminary. Also, I don't understand the concept of encasing all of the jokes inside mock newspaper clippings. Why would Idi Amin enrolling in a cooking class be newsworthy? Because he's dead? But wouldn't the headline then read: "Zombie Idi Amin rises from dead, enrolls in cooking class"?

I say, yes.

America's Most Wanted Names O.J. Simpson Co-Host
Ex-Football Star's Comments Sure to be Incisive

Again with a '90s reference. That's 2 in the first 2 jokes. These guys publish a news magazine. Is it to much to ask that they be aware of something that has happened in the past decade?

Anyway, the only way this joke makes logical sense is if you think homosexuality is off-putting in the same fashion as double-homicide. O.J. is not, actually, an inappropriate host for a show about wanted criminals. He has, in fact, been a wanted criminal. TWS editors are kidding, but they are actually correct - O.J.'s comments about evading the law in the aftermath of committing a horrible crime would probably be insightful.

Having him host "America's Most Wanted" would not be inappropriate, it would be in poor taste. So the only way the comparison here makes any sense is if you think James McGreevey showing his face in public and leading a normal life is in poor taste.

Next!

Kim Jong-Il to co-chair U.N. Commission on Human Rights
Priorities Include Population Control, Loyalty

Maybe this would work for me if it weren't being written by the Weekly Standard guys, pundits who actually endorse things like torture and therefore have no moral authority to attack Kim Jong-Il, in jest or otherwise.

At least they got their basic comic premise right for the first time! Just as Jim McGreevey, an openly gay man, would be an awkward fit as a priest in the eyes of bigots everywhere, Kim Jong-Il would be an awkward fit at the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. As would George W. Bush, for the record.

Joseph Goebbels Tapped to Head Radio Free Europe
Will Focus on Minority Rights, Living Space

So, thus far in our "parody" newspaper, we've had homosexuality equated to (1) cannibalism, (2) double murder and (3) ruthless authoritarian rule. Where else is there to go but National Socialism?

Seriously, Goebbels? You guys really want to equate Jim McGreevey's attempt to move on with his life and find religion with the Nazis rounding up European Jews? What the fuck has got to be wrong with someone for them to even come up with this?

And no, that's not a rhetorical question. I really want to know, medically, what has to happen to a human brain in order for it to forge a connection between a gay guy who's all about Jesus and the Nazi propaganda minister. Someone call House.

Bill Clinton to Serve as Judge for National Cheerleading Competition
Former President to Present "Spirit Stick"

Two points about this one, then I'll wrap up this week's GMCH.

(1) This joke totally violates the comic premise of the entire page. Bill Clinton, known horndog and lover of all women, would be an ideal judge for a cheerleading competition. That would not be an awkward fit. The only reason the Weekly Standard guys threw this in is their continuing obsession with Bill Clinton and his engorged member, even though he has not held public office in 7 years.

(2) The editors of a national news magazine running a dick joke on the last page strikes me as inappropriate and potentially offensive. ("Spirit Stick"? Old white guys are gross...) Why is it okay for them to inject frat-boy sexuality into the culture but not okay for Bill Clinton? He was a perv and a psychotic who degraded the office of the President. But to my knowledge, he never used a position of power in the mass media to distribute bad dick jokes. To my knowledge, anyway...

Spider-Man 3

Several film reviewers have noted how much crying Peter Parker does in Spider-Man 3. For a costumed crime-fighter, he spends an inordinate amount of time blubbering over failed relationships. Sam Raimi's entire franchise up until this point has focused on the soap opera elements of Stan Lee's original Spider-Man narrative - the long-term effect of superhero work on Peter Parker's love-life, his strained, competitive relationship with his best friend, his ceaseless search for a father figure following the loss of his beloved Uncle Ben and so forth.

But somewhere along the way, he's forgotten how to make an entertaining piece of pulp entertainment. There's nothing fun about the New York of Spider-Man any more. Frankly, it's a real bring-down, a city in which remarkable, miraculous feats of wonder happen literally every day but all the citizens still mope around like pathetic, depressed sadsacks because their lives are complicated, unfixable wrecks. Like a "Days of Our Lives" re-run, but with silly outfits.

Like Bryan Singer's dour attempt to revitalize the Superman franchise, Raimi his just totally misjudged the sensibility of his material in this outing. The result is one of the more painful superhero movies I have ever seen, a ponderous, drawn-out tangle of incidents that never even come close to cohering into anything that remotely resembles a story.













I'm totally so not kidding about the soap opera analogies. Now, yes, comic book stories and "romance" stories share many common elements and themes, and they're all designed with longevity in mind. That is, both soap operas and comic books have to start with simple premises that can be spun out over the course of years, or even decades. A certain amount of repetition and overheated theatrics are to be expected.

But Raimi (who wrote the script with his brother Ivan and Alan Sargent) should know better than to push his story in this many crazy directions at once. When we rejoin Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire), he's planning to propose to his girlfriend Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst). While they're enjoying a romantic evening in the woods, Parker is scoped out by some kind of weird black ooze that comes out of a meteor, which then follows him home. The outer space ooze melds with his Spidey suit, you see, and give him wacky outer space powers (never specified), but also make him ultra-aggressive and emo.

That would probably be enough plot for a decent Spider-Man movie right there. He's got girl trouble, he's enjoying this power suit but soon discovering horrible side effects, and in the end the suit would fall into the hands of someone else who he would then have to fight. Done and done. The premise is simple enough that you coudl take some time to develop actual sequences and characters, rather than hurtling through a half-baked load of nonsense in a vain attempt to link together 12 lame, pointless sub-plots.

But, no, Raimi has to keep piling on more and more and more incidents, long after the point of overkill. Perhaps he had made a bet with David Goyer over who could reference more individual comic book stories in a single script. In addition to the worries with Mary Jane and the Secret of the Ooze (or was that the Ninja Turtles?), an escaped convict (Thomas Haden Church) whose daughter is suffering from an unnamed movie-wasting-away disease falls into a weird particle accelorator or something that turns him into the Sandman. Plus, Peter gets into a stupid competition with a brash photographer (Topher Grace) who wants to take over his job. Oh, yeah, and he starts flirting with a cute girl in his class (Bryce Dallas Howard) whose life he saves during a random crane accident.

And Harry Osbourne (James Franco) still wants to kill Peter because he knows Peter is Spider-Man and Spider-Man killed his dad (Willem Dafoe) in the first movie. But then, in the film's most insultingly stupid sub-plot, Harry gets clunked on the head and develops amnesia (seriously), so he becomes Peter's best friend again. Oh, and Peter finds out that the scumbag who he thought killed his Uncle Ben actually was just there when Uncle Ben was killed, and the real killer is the Sandman.

I hope I didn't forget anything.

Worse yet, the dialogue in all of these different scenes is uniformly corny and entirely too on the nose. Characters tend to just blurt out the purpose of the scene directly, which makes for some incredibly forced, unnatural moments. I don't think Dunst really works in this role, and she has zero chemistry with Tobey Maguire, but this completely bland Mary Jane Watson character isn't really her fault. She is not allowed to have a personality; all her lines are designed solely to move the story forward. Have Peter and Mary Jane ever had a conversation that isn't directly about the state of their relationship? Do they ever, you know, discuss their favorite bands or that new Thai food place near the office that they tried for the first time last Tuesday?

I'm not sure it would even be possible to give the actors interesting or funny lines to say at this point (and wasn't Spider-Man funny in the comics?), because the entire trilogy's narrative has no forward momentum. It's an endless loop. Harry and Peter are still rivals for Mary Jane's affections, as they have been all along. Peter continues to struggle with balancing his superhero alter-ego with his responsibilities as a normal guy. Guilt and anger over his Uncle's death keep right on messing with his psyche and causing him to lash out, as they always have. And these problems, which all stem from years-old incidents, are all any of them can ever talk about! There's something not quite right about that.

These rather obvious, trite conflicts were never that interesting to begin with, but three movies into a franchise, they have become uninteresting on an existential level. Not only do I no longer care if Mary Jane and Peter can work things out...I am beginning to actively dislike them as people. Shit or get off the pot, kids. Life is short.

Even the action scenes feel expected and perfunctory this time around. Women are dropped from great heights, and Spider-Man makes expert use of his webbing to rescue them. Bombs are thrown and deflected, bystanders threatened but gently pushed out of harm's way. The special effects, which had made significant improvements from the first film to the second, have taken a slight step downward. There are still nice-looking moments to be sure - iconic shots of Spider-Man in his newly-dark suit in the rain, say, or Flint Marko's initial realization that his body has turned into sand. But many of the action scenes look blurry and indistinct. During the climax, the Sandman has turned into a large swirling mass of brown material that looked as much like a dookie monster as a man made of sand.

Essentially, there's a lot going on but absolutely nothing to see. Many stories begin, but none of them have any idea how to develop, and they certainly don't seem to end. And the half-narratives we do get are so blindingly obvious and straight-forward, I started to feel like I was watching "Dora the Explorer." We discover quickly that the big theme of the film is free will and the ability to choose our path in life because characters repeat the concept to one another at every opportunity. We know the black ooze is turning Peter evil because he looks vaguely emo! That pouty, adolescent attitude coupled with the unmistakable hint of lightly-applied eye shadow can only mean one thing...The end of Spider-Man as we know him!

One brief example before I stop harping on this too much. The Sandman character opens the film escaping from the police. He visits with his wife (improbably played by Theresa Russell) and movie-sick daughter briefly, they share terse words, and then he falls into the pit that turns him into the Sandman.

That is all the information we are given about Marko until the climax of the film. What was that thing that turned him into the Sandman? Does he feel pain? What does he hope to do in order to help his daughter? Steal money? Then why waste his time hunting down Spider-Man? When he's offered a deal at the end of the film to team up with another baddie to kill Spider-Man, why accept? What does he have to gain? If his only priority is to save his daughter (related in mawkish, obvious fashion by having him constantly stare at a locket containing her picture), who gives a shit about Spider-Man? There's so much going on, Raimi doesn't have time to worry about these details, so instead we get a muscly guy in a green and black top running around town aimlessly, occasionally stopping to turn into a sand cloud and knock some cars over. Yippee.

Look, I was not the biggest fan of Raimi's first Spider-Man film, but I never expected him to turn out an entry this limp or inane. This franchise needs to end now before something career-endingly tragic happens.