What a Charmer...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey, that's super...

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

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

Promising!

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



Let's continue.

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

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

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

Now THAT'S fair and balanced!

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

Sherri Shepherd Continues Sapping My Will to Live

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

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

"Is the world flat?"

"Yes."

Wrong. Cut and dry.

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

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



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

No Country For Old Men

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should You Wash Your Hands After Going #1?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Considerable Weekend

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

American Gangster

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



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

Neil Young at the Nokia Theater

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

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

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

Here's the full setlist:

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

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

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



V Lounge

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

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

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

Elizabeth: The Golden Age

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



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

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

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

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

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

NaNoWriMo-ing

So I've decided to take the plunge and participate in NaNoWriMo this November. That little bit of shorthand stands for National Novel Writing Month, 30 days in which a bunch of random strangers take a not-particularly-serious oath to complete a 50,000 word novel. (50,000 counts as a novel, I suppose, and not a novella, but just barely. It's about 175 pages.)

The site asks you to choose a "genre" for your profile, which was the first point at which it occurred to me that, here it is, November 2nd, and I don't even know what I'm going to write about. I'm sure I'll come up with something (I already have a few ideas), but just to lock myself in, I selected "Horror & Thriller" as my genre. So this should be interesting...

Anyone who has a lot of time on his or her hands and wants to take part in this thing should sign up as my buddy here!

Boys Becoming Men...Men Becoming Wolves...

Werewolf Bar Mitzvah, a one-off joke from an October episode of the fall-down funny "30 Rock," is now a bonafide cultural meme, and I couldn't be more pleased. No, really! Gawker informs me that WBM provided the theme for a New York hipster Halloween party. And if providing the theme for a New York hipster Halloween party doesn't make you a cultural meme...well, then I don't really know what the term "meme" means. And I'm fairly certain that I do. Let's say, 65% so.

Tracy Morgan has graciously now recorded a full version of the song, and College Humor has appropriately made a little photo-montage video to mark the occasion. Enjoy.

Greatness Skips a Generation...or Eight...

Mike Reagan is the son of Former President Ronald Reagan, seen here in this file photo dreaming about Phil Collins.



Mike has some amusing insights he'd like to share with you about the candidacy of HilRod Clinton. It comes in the form of "advice" Mike's handing out to Democrats. Why would any Democrats possibly take advice from a guy who spasms with glee at the very passing mention of a Republican victory in 2008? No particular reason. He just likes seeing his name in print.

Listen Barack Obama, John Edwards and all you other soon-to-be also-rans, lay off Hillary. She's well on her way to winning the nomination and we don't want anything to stand in her way, especially attacks on her character and integrity that might sidetrack her on the way to being your party's standard bearer.

So leave her alone, let her cruise her way to the nomination so we Republicans can have the pleasure of dissecting her in the general election campaign.

Reagan's column reads exactly like one of those comic Onion faux editorials, in which a joke is set up and then repeated/embellished for several paragraphs. In this case, the "joke" is that Republicans secretly (but not so secretly) hope for a Clinton victory in the Democratic primaries because they think they can destroy her in a general election, and Reagan will go ahead and essentially rephrase this point over and over again until he mercifully meets his mandatory minimum word count, so he can go back outside and finish building that fort or playing that game of freeze tag or whatever the hell he was doing before he started banging away hopelessly at his keyboard in an ultimately futile attempt to formulate a coherent argument. (Run-on sentences...they're fantastic!)

And she is about as dissectible as a politician can get, starting with her health care reform fiasco, her sleazy involvement in the White House travel office firings, her use of private detectives to smear and harass the women who accused her husband of sexual misconduct, and her most recent campaign finance shenanigans.

I'm genuinely curious...is anyone still swayed by this stuff? Any American over 25 is going to remember the last time a Clinton was in charge and Republicans were screeching over Travelgate and Whitewater and a whole bunch of other bullshit that no one really bothered to take in or understand. (The only thing anyone actually got upset about was the BJ, and even then no one gave a shit except Lucianne Goldberg, Ken Starr and Jay Leno.) I sincerely hope this is the Grand Republican Plan for 2008, Mikey.

Step 1: Get Clinton the nomination
Step 2: Bring up extremely uninteresting, incomprehensible, decades-old scandals
Step 3: Profit?

She'll most likely be running against Giuliani, a cousin-marrying New Yorker who's just wild about abortions and teh ghey. Maybe Mike should be more worried about his side's prospects than smearing Hillary. Who, lets face it, is not exactly a stranger to being smeared and is still around.

Want a sample of her negatives? Here's a bit from Ana Marie Cox's blog a year ago last August: "The Boston Herald reports on what 'ordinary, grass-roots Democrats' think about Hillary Clinton: 'Lying B**** . . . Shrew . . . Machiavellian . . . Evil, power-mad witch . . . The ultimate self-serving politician. . . Criminal . . . Megalomaniac . . . Fraud . . . Dangerous . . . Devil incarnate . . . Satanic . . . Power freak.'"

I'll be honest...There's a few of those perspectives on Hillary with which I agree. (Anyone who seeking political power with HilRod's drive and ferocity for this long would have to be a self-serving Machiavellian power freak. ALL ADJECTIVES, by the way, that apply to every major Republican candidate.) Were Mike a more insightful, less hacky writer, he might stop and consider how wretchedly disgraceful his own party must be for Democrats to consider voting for a satanic, evil, power-mad witch opponent. But naturally, he doesn't go there.

I know you Democrats don't want to do us Republicans any favors, but just this once let us have our way. Give us the opportunity to give the Republican attack machine another shot at Hillary Clinton. Let her coast to victory in the primaries. Then we'll take it from there.

Andrew Sullivan, always one to jump on the Hillary Hatred bandwagon, chimes in approvingly in a post titled "A Message to the Dems," as if Mike's misogynist diatribe were actually intended to provide genuine, non-ironic advice. It's fairly obvious from Mike's seething hatred of all things Clintonian and Sullivan's constant harping on her candidacy that they're afraid she's going to win. If you really thought your party could destroy Clinton in a general election, you'd shut up about it and make Democrats think she was unbeatable. A-duh. (In Sullivan's case, he just seems to loathe Clinton to an unnatural degree, somewhat similarly to the way I loathe Zach Braff. Of course, I cop to my irrational hatreds; Sullivan wants his to guide geopolitical events for the next eight years.

I think, dead-eyed stupidity aside, what bothers me most about Mike's column is its assumption that politics is and can only be about smearing ones opponents and playing dirty tricks. This election is about nothing NOTHING NOTHING for him other than winning. He doesn't even pretend to give a shit about the troops or the war or the economy or the education system or Social Security or even abortion and prayer in school! There is no agenda, only his team and the other team, and the goal is to drive them into the ground. To ELIMINATE them, really.

Which brings me, finally, to this post from right-wing haven Wizbang. Blogger Kim Priestap makes a very silly point in response to an experiment over at Democratic Underground, in which two liberal bloggers tested out waterboarding one another to gain perspective on the ongoing debate about the practice. Kimmy argues that, if these guys were voluntarily waterboarding themselves, it can't be torture, as if people being tortured had the option of stopping when it got too unpleasant.

Like I said, just silly. Not worth a blog post, really. I bring it up only because of the comments from Wizbang readers.

Scrapiron, the FIRST TO COMMENT, says this:

"Let me bring a half inch hammer drill and some bits and show them what torture is. Bet they won't want a do over."

He's fantasizing here, just to summarize, about drilling bits into his political opponents to prove a silly point.

Anon Y. Mous says:

"I'd like to prove that electric shock is torture. First, I'll need a few volunteers from the DU."

Yeah! That'd show 'em! That...um...torture is good? Bad? That two things that have nothing to do with one another can't both be torture? I don't even know any more...

Here's commenter Mike's torture fantasy:

"Maybe next time, in an effort to illustrate the "we're no better than they are" moral equivalence argument, they'll decide to try burning the skin off each other's back with a blowtorch, or gouging each other's eyeballs out with a rusty screwdriver. Or at least the tried-and-true car battery to the genitals. I wonder how many times they would subject themselves to that one."

Ouch. He's been listening to some Method Man lyrics.

Seriously, unless you're Bret Easton Ellis, you have no business even writing a sentence like that. Who are these sadistic fucks and is there a way I can guarantee that I never run into them outside of the Internet? I mean, aside from staying out of Alabama and Texas.

Here's a comment that isn't isolationist but just...I mean...read it for yourself...

god, foreigners are envious.

PJ O'Rourke did a riff explaining why foreigners acted like jerks in a desperate attempt to be noticed by americans: he compared it to the wild longings of a 13-year-old boy frantic to get the attention of a magnificent 24-year-old babe.

not a bad analogy. foreigners will of course angrily deny this. "we're GLEDD we don't hevv as much money and powwair as you stupid americans! we LAHK being impotent and ignored!"

Foreigners? This guy's making SWEEPING GENERALIZATIONS about the entire world population that doesn't come from the USA. (And you just know he pronounces it "furr-ners".) It would be hilarious if I didn't sense that 80-some percent of my countrymen felt the same way.

Criss Angel Disproves Shit You Already Knew Was False

So, apparently NBC has this show, "Phenomenon," that's like "American Idol" for magicians, and one of the two judges is that Criss Angel "Mindfreak" guy who pretended to have sex with Britney a little while back. Now, I would never watch this show, because I'm generally not a huge fan of magic, but this clip is HI-larious.

One of the contestants is this immense goober Jim Callahan, who claims that he can physically contact the spirit world. He has Raven-Symoné choose a mystery object at random and put it in a box filled with salt, then allows a spirit to actually use his body to write out the box's contents live on stage. (She chooses a toy truck, which is so Raven!)

Honestly, it's one of the silliest performances I've ever seen. He jerks around and makes noises and rolls his eyes into the back of his head - he even has the host caution the audience that his gyrations may be disturbing beforehand. Whoopi Goldberg doesn't take her performance this far in the film Ghost, and she's playing the scene for laughs.

Anyway, Callahan correctly "guesses" that the object in the box is metal and has four wheels. He's being coached by a ghost and he still can't come up with the word "truck"? What, does this ghost only speak in puzzles? Is it the ghost of Frank Gorshin? We're supposed to find this impressive somehow? I mean, seriously, this is such an old, tired line of bullshit...Fake mentalists used to pull this routine all the time, sending assistants into the audience to find random objects which the performer would then identify using code words. (For example, the assistant would say, "Can you tell me what I hold in my hands?," and this meant it was a pocket watch, whereas "What is the object I'm holding now?," would mean cigarette lighter. I'm sure Callahan's act is based on something similar.)

Criss Angel is having none of it, and just completely faces this Callahan guy on national television by holding up two more mystery envelopes and demanding to know what's inside. The ensuing tantrum, with Callahan calling Angel an "ideological bigot" (for not believing in magic!), may be one of the year's TV highlights:



That video was actually posted to YouTube BY Callahan, who seems to think that Angel's a hypocrite for not believing in spiritual possession. I'm not actually sure whether or not Angel has ever insisted that his magic is real and not just entertainment-themed illusion, so I can't speak to the claim of hypocrisy, but I do know that the term "ideological bigot" is really stupid and that Jim Callahan is a massive, ridiculous fraud. And not just a fraud, but an angry, insecure fraud. Which is funny.

October is the Cruellest Month

Happy Halloween, everyone!



[H/t Sample the Web]

Apache Boy

Watch this. It's pretty much the greatest music video of all time...



In my face...

The Daily Show...Well, A Daily Show. Maybe not THE Daily Show.

Mahalo Daily, our site's new podcast starring the incomparable Veronica Belmont, launches next week. So they've put up the trailer!



The Daily (as I like to call it) will cover what Mahalo covers, which basically means everything. I've seen some of the future episodes, and I think this is going to be a lot of fun. (We're even landing some big guests and other assorted insider-y goodness! Stay tuned...)

You know, when we were first starting the company, we had all kinds of ideas for podcasts. I even starred in some early variations. I think we're better off getting Veronica Belmont in front of the camera, all in all. Scoble and Ask a Ninja have already kind of cornered the market on Fat Nerd Podcasting. (Okay, I'm just kidding...You can never have enough Fat Nerds.) It's been really interesting to see this whole thing come together from just a concept into a full-blown show over the past few months.

At the very least, I promise The Daily's going to be more interesting than that Boing Boing podcast, which is kind of like having a boring guy tell you all about the Boing Boing posts from the previous day that he only half-remembers.

Movie Review Archive

Normally, the archive won't be on the front page like this. It'll be linked over there on the sidebar. But it took me a while to compile, so I thought I'd leave it up here at least for now.

6 categories, from best to worst, each sub-ordered by release year. Enjoy.



CLASSICS

There Will Be Blood (2007, Anderson)
No Country for Old Men (2007, Coen)
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007, Dominik)
Children of Men (2006, Cuaron)
INLAND EMPIRE (2006, Lynch)
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006, Charles)
The Departed (2006, Scorsese)
Munich (2005, Spielberg)
The New World (2005, Malick)
Grizzly Man (2005, Herzog)
Batman Begins (2005, Nolan)
Bob Dylan: No Direction Home (2005, Scorsese)
Match Point (2005, Allen)
Head-On/Lost Honor of Katherina Blum (2004, Akin/1975, Schlondorff)
Oldboy (2003, C. Park)
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance/Pickpocket/Forbidden Games (2002, C. Park/1959, Bresson/1952, Clement)
Minority Report (2002, Spielberg)
The Double Life of Veronique (1991, Kieslowski)
Withnail & I (1987, Robinson)
Cross of Iron (1977, Peckinpah)
Network/Kind Hearts and Coronets (1976, Lumet/1949, Hamer)
The Passenger (1975, Antonioni)
F for Fake (1974, Welles)
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974, Peckinpah)
Charley Varrick (1973, Siegel)
Army of Shadows (1969, Melville)
Goyokin/Three Outlaw Samurai (1969/1967, Gosha/Gosha)
Petulia (1968, Lester)
Point Blank (1967, Boorman)
Le Samourai/Wizard of Oz (1967, Melville/1939, Fleming)
Weekend (1967, Godard)
Masculine Feminine (1966, Godard)
The Professionals (1966, R. Brooks)
Sword of Doom (1966, Okamoto)
Fists in the Pocket (1965, Bellocchio)
Hound of the Baskervilles (1959, Fisher)
The Sweet Smell of Success (1957, Mackendrick)
Rebel Without a Cause (1955, Ray)
Pickup on South Street (1953, Fuller)
Night and the City (1950, Dassin)
Asphalt Jungle (1950, Huston)
Where the Sidewalk Ends/Kiss of Death/The Dark Corner (1950, Preminger/1947, Hathaway/1946, Hathaway)
Unfaithfully Yours/Palm Beach Story (1948, Sturges/1942, Sturges)
The Killers (1946, Siodmak)
Laura (1944, Preminger)
Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943, Powell and Pressburger)
Young Mr. Lincoln (1939, Ford)
King Kong (1933, Cooper and Schoedsack)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Juno (2007, J. Reitman)
The Darjeeling Limited (2007, Anderson)
Eastern Promises (2007, Cronenberg)
Rocket Science (2007, Blitz)
The Simpsons Movie (2007, Silverman)
Live Free or Die Hard (2007, Wiseman)
Rescue Dawn (2007, Herzog)
Knocked Up (2007, Apatow)
Hot Fuzz (2007, Wright)
Grindhouse (2007, Rodriguez and Tarantino)
Zodiac (2007, Fincher)
Black Book (2006, Verhoeven)
The Lives of Others (2006, Henckel von Donnersmarck)
The Queen (2006, Frears)
Marie Antoinette (2006, S. Coppolla)
Casino Royale (2006, Campbell)
A Scanner Darkly (2006, Russell)
The Proposition (2006, Hillcoat)
V for Vendetta (2006, McTeigue)
Find Me Guilty (2006, Lumet)
The Road to Guantanamo (2006, Winterbottom)
Hostel (2006, Roth)
Caché (2005, Haneke)
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005, Black)
13 (Tzameti) (2005, Babluani)
Brokeback Mountain (2005, Lee)
Good Night, and Good Luck.(2005, Clooney)
A History of Violence (2005, Cronenberg)
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005, Gibney)
Broken Flowers (2005, Jarmusch)
Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (2005, Greenwald)
The King (2005, Marsh)
Sin City (2005, Rodriguez)
Star Wars: Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith (2005, Lucas)
Howl's Moving Castle (2004, Miyazaki)
The Aviator (2004, Scorsese)
Undertow (2004, D. Green)
Bad Education (2004, Almoldovar)
Survive Style 5+ (2004, Sekiguchi)
Sideways (2004, Payne)
Closer (2004, Nichols)
A Very Long Engagement (2004, Jeunet)
I Heart Huckabees (2004, Russell)
Friday Night Lights (2004, Berg)
Cafe Lumiere (2003, Hou)
Fear and Trembling (2003, Corneau)
Memories of Murder (2003, Bong)
The Man Who Copied (2003, Furtado)
I'm Not Scared (2003, Salvatores)
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring (2003, K. Kim)
Overnight (2003, Montana and Smith)
Funny Ha Ha (2002, Bujalski)
Donnie Darko: Director's Cut (2001, Kelly)
The Isle (2000, K. Kim)
Fresh Bait (1995, Tavernier)
Cemetary Man (1994, Saovi)
Cronos (1993, Del Toro)
Trauma (1993, Argento)
My Own Private Idaho (1991, Van Sant)
Naked Lunch (1991, Cronenberg)
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990, Stoppard)
Metropolitan (1990, Stillman)
Rumble Fish (1983, F. F. Coppola)
Southern Comfort (1981, Hill)
Cutter's Way (1981, Passer)
Thief (1981, Mann)
Bad Timing (1980, Roeg)
The Driver (1978, Hill)
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976, Roeg)
The Laughing Policeman (1973, Rosenberg)
Sisters (1973, De Palma)
Prime Cut (1972, Ritchie)
Winter Soldier (1972)
Hunger (1966, Carlsen)
Jigoku (1960, Nakagawa)
Elevator to the Gallows (1958, Malle)
House of Bamboo/The Street With No Name (1955, Fuller/1948, Keighley)
Clash by Night (1952, Lang)
The Man in the White Suit (1951, Mackendrick)
Born to Kill (1947, Wise)
Lifeboat (1944, Hitchcock)
Fury (1936, Lang)
Hands Across the Table (1935, Leisen)
I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932, LeRoy)

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Superbad (2007, Mottola)
3:10 to Yuma (2007, Mangold)
1408 (2007, Håfström)
Fantastic Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007, Story)
Blades of Glory (2007, Gordon and Speck)
Little Children (2006, Field)
Pan's Labyrinth (2006, Del Toro)
Babel (2006, Innaritu)
The Prestige (2006, Nolan)
The Black Dahlia (2006, De Palma)
Little Miss Sunshine (2006, Dayton and Farris)
Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006, McKay)
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006, Verbinski)
An Inconvenient Truth (2006, Guggenheim)
Accepted (2006, Pink)
The Break-Up (2006, Reed)
Running Scared (2006, Kramer)
Underworld: Evolution (2006, Wiseman)
Slither (2006, Gunn)
Inside Man/CSA (2006, Lee/2004, Willmott)
Lemming (2005, Moll)
Edmond (2005, Gordon)
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005, Burton)
The Matador/The Libertine (2005, Shepard/2004, Dunmore)
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005, Jones)
Capote (2005, Miller)
The Squid and the Whale (2005, Baumbach)
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005, Newell)
Pride and Prejudice (2005, Wright)
Walk the Line (2005, Mangold)
The Aristocrats (2005, Jilette and Provenza)
Thumbsucker (2005, Mills)
Junebug (2005, Morrison)
Hustle & Flow (2005, Brewer)
Red Eye (2005, Craven)
The Wedding Crashers (2005, Dobkin)
War of the Worlds (2005, Spielberg)
Lady Vengeance (2005, C. Park)
Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005, July)
Devil's Rejects (2005, Zombie)
Land of the Dead (2005, Romero)
Constantine (2005, Lawrence)
Palindromes (2005, Solondz)
Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic (2005, Lynch)
The Descent/Let's Scare Jessica to Death (2005, N. Marshall/1971, Hancock)
The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005, Apatow)
2046 (2004, Wong)
Downfall (2004, Hirschbiegel)
Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004, Silberling)
Steamboy (2004, Otomo)
Creep (2004, C. Smith)
Izo/Quintet/Demon Seed (2004/1979/1977, Miike/Altman/Cannell)
Hotel Rwanda (2004, George)
The Woodsman (2004, Kassell)
Primer (2004, Carruth)
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004, Conran)
Ocean's Twelve (2004, Soderbergh)
Saw (2004, Wan)
Vera Drake (2004, Leigh)
The Brown Bunny (2003, Gallo)
A Tale of Two Sisters (2003, J. Kim)
Rounders (1998, Dahl)
The Eel (1997, Imamura)
The Frighteners: Director's Cut (1996, Jackson)
Bugsy (1991, Levinson)
Cape Fear (1991, Scorsese)
Casualties of War (1989, De Palma)
Year of the Dragon (1985, Cimino)
The Big Red One (1981, Fuller)
Three Days of the Condor (1975, Pollack)
Viva Maria (1965, Malle)
Warlock (1959, Dmytryk)
Seven Men From Now (1956, Boetticher)
Panic in the Streets (1950, Kazan)
Call Northside 777 (1948, Hathaway)
Possessed (1947, Bernhardt)

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Bourne Ultimatum (2007, Greengrass)
The Science of Sleep (2006, Gondry)
My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006, I. Reitman)
World Trade Center (2006, Stone)
The Devil Wears Prada (2006, Frankel)
Idlewild (2006, Barber)
Miami Vice (2006, Mann)
Mission: Impossible III (2006, Abrams)
X-Men: The Last Stand (2006, Ratner)
16 Blocks (2006, Donner)
Silent Hill (2006, Gans)
Tsotsi (2005, Hood)
Syriana (2005, Gaghan)
The Notorious Bettie Page (2005, Harron)
Hard Candy (2005, Slade)
Aeon Flux (2005, Kusama)
Ellie Parker/Pray (2005, Coffey/2005, Sato)
Wolf Creek (2005, McLean)
King Kong (2005, Jackson)
Memoirs of a Geisha (2005, R. Marshall)
Jarhead (2005, Mendes)
The Ice Harvest (2005, Ramis)
North Country (2005, Caro)
Separate Lies (2005, Fellowes)
The Weather Man (2005, Verbinski)
Wallace and Gromit in Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005, N. Park)
Oliver Twist (2005, Polanski)
The Island (2005, Bay)
The Constant Gardener (2005, Meirelles)
Inside Deep Throat (2005, Bailey and Barbato)
Bubble (2005, Soderbergh)
Kingdom of Heaven (2005, R. Scott)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005, Jennings)
Melinda and Melinda (2004, Allen)
The Machinist (2004, B. Anderson)
Kung Fu Hustle (2004, Chow)
Team America: World Police (2004, Parker)
Kinsey (2004, Condon)
National Treasure (2004, Turteltaub)
Enduring Love (2004, Michell)
Meet the Fockers (2004, Roach)
Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War (2004, Kang)
The Last Shot (2004, Nathanson)
The Life Aquatic (2004, W. Anderson)
Million Dollar Baby (2004, Eastwood)
Modern Romance (1981, A. Brooks)
Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972, Gibson)
The Cincinnati Kid (1965, Jewison)
High Sierra (1941, Walsh)
Gunga Din (1939, Stevens)

PROCEED WITH EXTREME CAUTION

Michael Clayton (2007, Gilroy)
The Kingdom (2007, Berg)
Stardust (2007, Vaughn)
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007, Verbinski)
Spider-Man 3 (2007, Raimi)
All the King's Men (2006, Zaillian)
Tideland (2006, Gilliam)
Clerks II (2006, K. Smith)
The Da Vinci Code (2006, Howard)
Cars (2006, Lasseter)
The Omen/Feast (2006, Moore/2005, Gulager)
The Hills Have Eyes (2006, Aja)
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006, Lin)
An American Haunting (2005, Solomon)
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (2005, Adamson)
Brick(2005, R. Johnson)
Derailed (2005, Hafstrom)
Mirrormask (2005, McKean)
The Brothers Grimm (2005, Gilliam)
Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (2005, Burton and Johnson)
The Bad News Bears (2005, Linklater)
Pretty Persuasion (2005, Siega)
Fantastic Four (2005, Story)
Havoc (2005, Kopple)
March of the Penguins (2005, Jacquet)
Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005, Liman)
Bewitched (2005, Ephron)
Kicking and Screaming (2005, Dylan)
The Amityville Horror (2005, Douglas)
Sahara (2005, Eisner)
The Ring Two (2005, Nakata)
The Great New Wonderful (2005, Leiner)
The Interpreter (2005, Pollack)
Hostage (2005, Siri)
Cursed (2005, Craven)
The Jacket (2005, Maybury)
White Noise (2005, Sax)
In Good Company (2004, Weitz)
Beyond the Sea (2004, Spacey)
Eros (2004; Wong, Soderbergh and Antonioni)
Layer Cake (2004, Vaughn)
Spanglish (2004, J. Brooks)
The Toolbox Murders (2004, Hooper)
Alien vs. Predator (2004, P. W. S. Anderson)
The Forgotten (2004, Ruben)
Alexander: Director's Cut (2004, Stone)
Dark Water (2002, Nakata)
Wise Guys (1986, De Palma)
Equinox (1970, Muren and Woods)

BRAFFSTERPIECES

Southland Tales (2007, Kelly)
Transformers (2007, Bay)
300 (2007, Snyder)
Lady in the Water (2006, Shyamalan)
Superman Returns (2006, Singer)
Scoop (2006, Allen)
Thank You For Smoking(2006, J. Reitman)
Lucky Number Slevin(2006, McGuigan)
Basic Instinct 2(2006, Caton-Jones)
United 93(2006, Greengrass)
Friends With Money(2006, Holofcener)
Nacho Libre (2006, Hess)
The Wicker Man (2006, LaBute)
The Sentinel(2006, C. Johnson)
Freedomland/Date Movie (2006, Roth/2006, Seltzer)
Poseidon(2006, Peterson)
When a Stranger Calls/The Ringer (2006, West/2005, Blaustein)
A Sound of Thunder (2005, Hyams)
Serenity (2005, Whedon)
Beowulf and Grendel (2005, Gunnarsson)
XXX: State of the Union (2005, Tamahori)
Daltry Calhoun (2005, Bronson)
Elizabethtown (2005, Crowe)
Flightplan (2005, Schwentke)
Rumor Has It (2005, Reiner)
Cinderella Man (2005, Howard)
Lord of War (2005, Niccol)
Domino (2005, T. Scott)
Crash (2005, Haggis)
Bloodrayne (2005, Boll)
The Producers (2005, Stroman)
The Polar Express (2004, Zemeckis)
Mindhunters (2004, Harlin)
Exorcist: The Beginning (2004, Harlin)
Ray (2004, Hackford)
Finding Neverland (2004, Forster)
Blade: Trinity (2004, Goyer)
Suspect Zero (2004, Merhige)
High Roller: The Stu Ungar Story (2003, Vidmer)
The Duchess and The Dirtwater Fox (1976, Frank)
The Magus (1968, G. Green)

You repo men, you're all out to fuckin' lunch

This trailer for Repo: The Genetic Opera is getting attention because it features The Paris Hilton. But it deserves attention for being one of the most ludicrous things ever made.



It's not the concept of a horror musical that's notable. That's been done quite a bit. Phantom of the Paradise. Rocky Horror Picture Show. Can't Stop the Music. What makes Repo: The Genetic Opera stand out is that it looks like the storyboard to an Korn music video, only instead of that Korn idiot, you've got Paris Hilton - a person who, to the best of my recollection, doesn't so much sing as she does exhale in the vicinity of a microphone, filling in the actual singing via a sophisticated network of computers.

I'm not sure if "Korn music video storyboard", or even "Bargain Bin rehash of a Saw workprint" quite captures the aesthetic of Repo: The Genetic Opera (and what is with that name...putting "genetic" in the title of a movie featuring Paris Hilton is just asking for trouble. Perhaps they received a payoff from the Porn Titler's Union Local #290.)

Okay, first imagine that Brett Ratner directed a remake of Interview with the Vampire as a student film back in his NYU days, scored entirely by the campus glee club, while they were all in the midst of a 12-day adderall binge. Then, overexpose the film. Then cover it in vaseline and chicken shit. Now throw Goth Paris Hilton in there. That's the Repo: Genetic Opera trailer.

I hope it succeeds, though. If there's one thing we need, it's more campy slasher musicals. Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd means there's only two such films coming out in the next few months. I think we can do better than that...

A Portrait of Authority

"Beat on the Braff", the second-most-trafficked post in Crushed by Inertia history, gets a lot of comments. Some are positive (towards me and thus negative to Zach Braff), some negative (- to me, + to Braff). Some I think may even BE Zach Braff.

So last night, I'm a bit tipsy, because I just got home from the Man Man show at the Troubadour. (Quick notes on the show: It was really good, because Man Man is amazing, but the place was way overcrowded and the attendees were largely smelly assholes. And I'm not using figurative language here...At one point, I had a really good look at the stage, but I had to go somewhere else because the man next to me smelled intensely awful, like the full, lidless dumpster behind the Franco-American factory eight weeks into a sanitation strike. And the crowd was moshing, during Man Man, which is just poor form, but did kind of take me back to my teenage years, desperately trying to get close enough to the stage to hear Lagwagon without being knocked over. By the way, if you're around my age and listened to Lagwagon in high school, don't click that link and see how old those dudes are now unless you want to get deeeeeeeeeeee-pressed.)

Anyway, I'm tipsy, and I find there's a new comment in the "Beat on the Braff" forum, from Anonymous:

Sir, I could not disagree with you more.

Sir? Right off the bat, he's not doing so hot with that kind of affectation. Who addresses a blog comment to "Sir," and particularly an insulting one?

I don't think Zach Braff neccesarily [sic] deserves the amount of praise and hype he's gotten, but he is talented.

I mean, how to respond to such a thing? I don't think the guy is talented. This guy does...We're at an impasse. Why not just leave it at that?

I don't know if you have any credentials to back up your assertions that he cannot direct or act, but I do.

OH NO NO NO NO NO. WHY? Why go there? Why imply that I don't have a right to an opinion? What is to be gained?

Nothing pisses me off more than the near-daily comments posted to this blog by strangers who want to insist that I don't have a right to feel things or express feelings publicly. This is the essence of living in a free society. It's the FIRST FUCKING THING they wrote in the Bill of Rights. Before OWNING A GUN, EVEN!

There's no logical reason anyone could possibly be compelled to shut me up because, let's face it, I'm reaching a few hundred people a day here...I have no impact...There's no greater geopolitical significance to my saying what I want to say.

Bill O'Reilly...now THAT'S a guy I'd love to be able to shut up, because he's genuinely poisoning our airwaves with ignorant lies and violently militaristic propaganda, spreading a message of hate and fear to millions of Americans daily. But, me? I'm a sarcastic Jew who dislikes a big Hollywood actor/director and enjoys sharing this opinion with others. The only reason this guy wants me to shut up is that he feels threatened by my opinion.

I don't know why...

Maybe, as an actor, he fears that audiences will feel liberated to dislike his work, in the same way I dislike Braff's. So he's putting himself in Braff's shoes and realizing that the sting of professional criticism may be more than he can bear.

OR perhaps his precious opinions on acting are the only things in which he can truly take pride, and as my strongly worded opinion differs from his own, he must either snuff me out or concede that he is worthless as a human being.

I suppose there are a few other possibilities. But needless to say, I don't like being told that I lack the credentials to voice an opinion. Perhaps you disagree with my assertions, and maybe you can even back up your rebuttal with evidence and win the argument, but you don't have a right to tell me I can't think what I want or make my voice heard.

Why anyone would even want to do such a thing is beyond me.

Furthermore, I think that you just want something or someone to hate. You probably spend so much time hating Zach Braff that you never objectively look at what he's done and what he's doing.

A lot of people make this argument in re: my opinion of Zach Braff. As if I had some sort of motive in hating him aside from...hating him. I just don't like the guy. Is it maybe a bit irrational, in that my dislike for his acting exceeds my dislike for the equally mediocre acting of his peers? Sure. I'll grant that.

But no one makes this argument. People instead come here and deny my authority to even make an argument in the first place, then they try to imply that my hatred of Braff is based on some irrational delusion. Like I just felt a desperate urge to hate someone one day, and his was the first face I saw, and now he's imprinted on my brain like a Mama Duck. No one behaves in this way. If I say I dislike someone, it's probably because I have seen what they do and am not a fan.

I, recently, harbored a blood hatred for Leonardo Di Caprio: upon watching Blood Diamond, I conceded that I may be mistaken. Back to the point: I don't idolize Zach Braff, but I do think he's talented, and I think he works harder than a lot of actor/directors.

Wow...a BLOOD hatred. I've never even gone that far.

But notice that this guy permits HIMSELF to hold these kinds of strong opinions (and unquestionably about superior actors to Zach Braff). I'm just not allowed. Because I lack credentials. Who actually thinks this way? Who could possibly be this smug? I mean, that isn't Bill Maher.

So, BEARING IN MIND, as I said, that I was a few beers deep at the time...I left this comment back for the guy:

Oh, last commenter, please elaborate. Tell me more of these CREDENTIALS you have for evaluating acting and directing. A degree in Advanced Academic Evaluationisticisms from the Sorbonne, perhaps? A G.E.D. from the Tuscaloosa, Alabama High School for the Performing Arts?

You know what, you goddamn waste of space? Your opinion has no more or less validity than anyone else's. That's a fucking FACT and you better start dealing with it. Your nonsensical parading around the Internet, ANONYMOUSLY claiming that you can lord your opinion over others like a weapon, kind of makes me want to throw up or hit you or both. (Maybe throw up on you whilst hitting you.)

Get off my blog.

And I meant it, by the way. Not that I want to shut this guy up...cause who really cares what he has to say...but because I hate this kind of energy on my blog, even on old posts that I could safely just ignore. If people are going to argue with me, I want a nice, solid, good-faith argument, not some sort of academic pissing contest. (The "waste of space" line may have been a bit far...but I've always liked that insult. It's kind of one of my go-to insults.)

Anyway, the guy came back and left a comment with his name. I won't reprint it here, but you can just go to original post and see for yourself if you're so inclined...

Ha! You call ME a waste of space?

Yeah, I guess that was a bit too far...

The irony is delicious. You are a pretentious, self-righteous ass, and I will not leave simply because you say so.

Bear in mind, this is the same guy who said I lacked the credentials to gauge Zach Braff's acting skills. He's calling me pretentious.

And, for the record, the credentials are a BFA in Acting from Southern Oregon University, an MFA in acting from Yale, and many years of acting experience.

In...in my face? I guess? I mean, SOU, you know...Fuck me...

Honestly, I just...I just don't know how to respond here. I mean, who takes degrees this seriously? I have a Master's Degree, too, and it was a massive waste of 2 years. That's not to say that everyone's grad school experience was the same. I know some people who got a tremendous amount out of their post-graduate education. But to imagine that a few extra years in some classroom grants you superior, elite wisdom, such that your opinion gains immediate and permanent supremacy over all others...it's insane. This man actually thinks he's the Arbiter of Taste because he has some diploma up on his wall, or because he's been in some plays or "CSI" episodes or commercials for hand soap or whatever he means by "many years of acting experience."

I would also like to point out that I think it's funny that you feel you that your opinion on acting and directing, etc, is just as valid as mine, even though you have never studied it and probably don't know what 'it' is, or what makes 'it' good and bad.

I don't know what acting is? Really? Well, I'm not positive, but isn't it a lot like pretending...only with more accuracy? (Actually, I'm sure the writer of the comment would disagree with my contention that acting is essentially artistic pretending, but that would be because he is, as I mentioned above, a titanically massive bag full of douche, and I mean that in the least misogynist way possible).

I will use the analogy of acting to fine arts such as sculpture. You would know what you like an don't like, but I would hope that you're not so rash as to walk into a fine arts museum and start calling famous sculptures "bad" because you dislike them.

Anyone else reminded of our old friend, Brian Atene?



You wouldn't, because beyond what you like or dislike, you have no credentials on which to base an objective judgment of the piece's artistic worth. Yet, in acting, you feel you do have the credentials to judge an actor's work.

Did you follow that, or was that too many words for your miniature brain?

And since you have an issue with me posting anonymously, despite the fact that I don't think my name has anything to do with this, I will include me name. You cannot bully me.

For the record, here's what I said about Zach Braff's acting:

I mean, writing/directing aside, have you see "Scrubs"? It's a half-hour mugging session. The guy does more double-takes in an episode than Wile E. Coyote. That's acting? That's a performance? Bugging out your eyes or looking winsome? I mean, I guess it's not that hard to be the best sitcom actor around. You're competing in a field where Master Craftsmen are Jim Belushi, Kevin James and Ray Romano. It's slightly more competitive than winning a footrace against 3rd graders.

Seems to me that I'm just expressing a rather straightforward opinion. I may not have an MFA, but I know what mugging looks like, and I know that Jim Belushi is considered among the top tier of sitcom actors. One more time, for the record, we're talking about sitcoms, not the Collected Works of George Bernard fucking Shaw. They let Tom Shales review TV shows every day, and I'm pretty sure that guy's not allowed to ride the bus on his own.

Anyway, I'm just really gobsmacked that anyone would feel like they have this kind of authority or expertise, that they're free to visit the blogs of strangers and INSTRUCT them about the types of posts they can make and opinions they can hold. I left him a long, harshly-phrased comment to this effect back on the original post, not so much because I care about convincing this most-likely-hopeless case, but just because I occasionally need to vent. I have hopefully now gotten it out of my system.