PoP! Goes My Heart

Kicking and screaming. That’s right; when my wife drug me out to see Music and Lyrics on Friday evening. Truthfully, other that those awful Bridget Jones roles, I like Hugh Grant. Yea, he’s stuck in a genre, alright, but at least he pulls off the formula quite well and always manages a few lines that just crack me up. I really have no idea if others find them as funny as I do.

So, he’s this washed up 80’s pop star (boy band) working the typical gigs for someone who didn’t figure out how to parlay his money into something else before it was gone. Then comes the big break, and he has an opportunity to write the musical score for the then current pop super-star. And, so, in the unlikely scenario, he’s working in his apartment with this "existentialist" lyricist when the "plant lady" (Dew Barrymore) starts humming out lyrics. Quite uncharacteristically for a film of this sort (ha-ha), before you know it, Hugh and Drew have teamed up and are writing the hoped-for new-big-hit together.

But all this is laced through the story of Hugh’s real life as a washed up 80’s pop star, and so you get some funny lines. This one; a narrative interlude to a song performed at some sort of 80s high-school reunion, with portly 40-year-old women packed against the stage, screaming.

"Tell me the truth, ladies. Are my pants too tight?"

[More screaming] Funny.

Of course, Drew is not without her history either. There’s a new best seller by a literary professor that tells the story of a sort of dysfunctional love affair. Yep, you guessed it. Drew is the fictional character. And so, in the most unlikely of possible scenarios, Hugh and Drew are in a restaurant celebrating their collaborative success, when she spots Mr. Professor at the bar with some friends.

Distraught, she heads off to the powder room, and in a never-before-seen act on film, Hugh follows her in. Of course, she’s had a whole speech prepared for over a year, for just this sort of inevitable confrontation. Hugh encourages her to go confront the man and give her speech. But she’s getting cold feet, whch is when we get one of the other lines that just cracked me up.

"Look; you have to do this. Everyone waits their whole life to run into an ex-lover when things are going really good."

Ha! Anyway, to give you an idea of the sort of parody this films aims to achieve (and succeeds, I think), I give you the opening to the film, PoP! Goes My Heart, which is a flashback to an 80s number one hit. Look for Hugh in makeup and hairdo, and see if this doesn’t just make you laugh your ass off.

Casino Royale

First, it should strike nobody as surprising that I’d blog about how I liked a Bond film. I pretty much like them all — some better than others — and can think of a whole lot of worse ways to spend a couple of hours. I believe the principal element that draws me to Bond films, as with other such films, is that I really like plots that take place in several exotic locations throughout a story.

What would a Bond film be without at least two or three jaunts to some remote and exotic part of the planet?

Mercifully, my dad and I were able to escape the house filled with way too many people and steal away for three hours to go see the first showing, just after noon. I must say that I liked Casino Royale easily as much as any Bond film I’ve ever seen. For my entertainment, Daniel Craig is the best Bond since Connery, and if he puts in such performances in subsequent films, he might even eclipse the great Sean. Not that I’ve done any great analysis, or thinking about it, but all attempts to duplicate the gentlemanly class of Connery have failed, with perhaps Roger Moore being the closest to get it right. Daniel Craig, in that sense, is an admission that the unique quality of Connery just can’t ever be matched, and so they’ve just given up and given us a Bond that clearly makes up for it with his own unique style, passion and character.

I just was not disappointed in the slightest. It’s really a classic sort of spy thriller. No special effects to speak of, almost no gadgetry, both a classic and modern Aston Martin, and lots of great physical stunts. They’ve gone back to basics, and it works.

Toward the end of the film, as Bond is recovering from a serious beating, we see him at a private hospital of sorts on the shores of a lake. I leaned over to my dad and said that it sure looked a lot like Lake Como (Wikipedia), which my wife and I just could not pass up while driving between Florence and Paris, via Switzerland, this summer. We even ended up driving up one side of it to Belagio, looking for a hotel in the evening but ended up heading back down to the village of Como to find a place right on the southern shore. It’s one of the most beautiful lakes I’ve ever seen (and I grew up around Tahoe), particularly in how the shoreline has been nearly completely rendered to the divine, artistic, landscape-architectural use of man.

Anyway, yes, and quick search revealed that Lake Como was the location in the film. You’ll see what I mean in some of those really choice shots.

Needless to say, I highly recommend the film for good old action-packed suspense.

Snakes on a Plane

Lots of fun. Went to see it last night with some friends/relatives while visiting here in Vista, CA, just north of San Diego.

A real riot. Samuel L. at his normal best. Go see.

“America: from Freedom to Fascism”

There exists, by my count, about one million definitions for the overused and misunderstood multi-purpose-pejorative-at-large: fascism. This section from Wikipedia gets closest to what I judge to be its essential defining characteristic:

Fascism is also typified by totalitarian attempts to impose[s] state control over all aspects of life: political, social, cultural, and economic. The fascist state regulates and controls (as opposed to nationalizing) the means of production.

(strikeouts & brackets, mine)

See here as well for a broader discussion. I don’t have a reference in front of me and Google didn’t save me, but I think Ayn Rand did the best job of crystallizing the difference between socialism and fascism. Both wield absolute control and power over everything, but in socialism there is no pretense at "property rights," whereas in fascism, there is. In fascism, the corporations are turned into the agents of the state, i.e., pretty much what the United States is today.

You, my dear friends, live under a fascism that you have easily been fooled into believing was "freedom," and you have for a pretty long time now. Perhaps now the Leviathan is getting to be such that people might start to get a clue. I dunno, but I certainly applaud anything that makes a serious try at waking people up to it.

So I came across what looks to be an interesting new film today. Head over there and do watch all three trailers. They are worth more than several thousand words of description here. Oh, yea: I could pick at it quite a lot. The whole Federal Reserve and tax protester stuff is nonsense. I mean, it undercuts the entire premise of the film: if your problem is a fascist State that creates funny money and taxes you, your problem isn’t funny money and taxes. Your problem is a fascist State. More fundamentally, your problem is the State.

Baby steps.

This sort of thing is step one for most people. Before they come to recognize the total illegitimacy of the State, per se, they perhaps must first come to understand how it arbitrarily creates politicized laws it does not itself abide. Of course it doesn’t: it’s the State. It seems simple enough, but the journey of enlightenment from democrat or republican to libertarian to anarchist can be a long road that takes decades to traverse.

In that sense, it looks to me like this film is potentially a great step along that road. Not everyone will be convinced, of course. At a point along the journey, everyone must ultimately grapple with one single principle: do you believe that domination of others  (excluding small children and the infirm) through the initiation of force (non-defensive) to achieve any goal is ever justified for any reason, including retribution? If you cannot answer in the unequivocal negative, then you are either a brute whom peaceful people ought never associate with, or you’re unwilling to dominate people yourself, but are content to have your agents (those people you "vote" for and those in their employ) do your dirty-work for you. You know, dirty work like deporting "illegal" immigrants:

(I posted that photo here before, but John Lopez just reminded me about it.)

Calling the Kettle Black

I enjoyed reading Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code. You might have noticed the Da Vinci quote at the top of this blog and that book was where I first read of it. Also, the background is a cropped portion of a Da Vinci sketch that I manipulated in one of those ‘photoshop’ things.

I saw the film last evening in a packed theater that must have been 90 degrees. Ugh. Could have done without that. The film was OK, I suppose. It hit the main points of the story, but almost in a mechanical and rushed way. It naturally wasn’t nearly as entertaining as the novel. As an aside, his Angels & Demons (written and published prior to TDVC) was a far better, more action-packed novel, in my view.

What a kerfuffle we’ve got here, eh? Up. In. Arms. To say the least. Wow. Y’know, I found the excitement concerning the novel to be quite charming and entertaining. Here you had people recommending it and talking about it in hushed tones to others as if it were a legitimate, scholarly refutation of core beliefs. I suppose that where intelligence, reason, logic and the scientific method won’t suffice, you’ve always got fiction.

Occam’s Razor comes to mind, once again. You know; that’s the principle, roughly stated, that says when you hear the beating of hooves, think horses, not zebras.

…when multiple competing theories have equal predictive powers,
the principle recommends selecting those that introduce the fewest
assumptions and postulate the fewest hypothetical entities.

Well, this is not a rigorous treatment of the thing, by any means, but it strikes me as rather hilarious that we have an unprovable, untestable supernatural explanation surrounding western civilization’s chief myth, employing hundreds of inter-connecting and self-reliant assumptions, countered by an admittedly fictional though natural explanation for this mythology and some cannot understand the allure. The allure is simple. Dan Brown’s explanation is better. It makes more sense. It’s more "plausible," but certainly only in a relative sense. It’s probably just as whacked as the Bible’s version, but as long as we’re believing in fairy tales, what difference does it make which version?

Here are some quotes that cracked me up, from here and here.

…the head of one group went further, calling the movie "a real, real danger" to the faith of Catholics and other Christians. ("Danger?" -ed)

…many Catholics and Christians don’t know church history to the detail
that Dan Brown gets into" in his "Da Vinci Code" novel and its film
adaptation. (So the "danger[ous]" Dan Brown knows church history, does he? -ed)

Baehr told the Washington, D.C., news conference that fiction can have a powerful impact on people… (How ironic! -ed)

films can have a particularly strong effect because darkened theaters
eliminate most distractions, giving moviegoers a "monopoly of the mind"
that can be more persuasive than books or other visual media. (…or massive cathedrals of stone and marble adorned with exotic hardwoods and tapestries, whose occupant authorities wear flowing robes? -ed)

he and his organization are also urging the public to boycott the film because it is "a fantasy passing as reality" (…and he should know. -ed)

…the big-screen adaptation of Dan Brown’s best-selling novel distorts history… (…which, you know, we’d like to keep our running monopoly on. -ed)

It deliberately presents fiction as fact. (We are against deliberately presenting fiction as fact. -ed)

…the film muddles fact and fiction… (…completely corrupting the fiction. -ed)

…upsetting people who have been Catholics all their lives who now don’t know what is true and what is lies. (What, still? -ed)

Greek authorities banned the film for viewers under 17, saying it
touched on "religious and historical questions of major importance that
a minor is not able to evaluate." (I guess the Greek Orthodox Church doesn’t ‘touch’ on "religious and historical questions of major importance." -ed)

[Monsignor Jean-Michel di Falco] Leandri said he would not call for a boycott because the movie "really
isn’t worth worrying about — it’s so far-fetched that no one will
believe it." (Obviously an authority on the "far-fetched." -ed)

So, there you have it.

(Article links: Carlos)

A Convenient Lie

During a visit to the cinema last evening, I was "treated" to the trailer for the upcoming Al Gore film: An Inconvenient Truth. Knock yourselves out. If you’re unable to detect the difference between real science, and an agenda that cherry picks out-of-context material for use in post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies, then what the hell? — you’re a moron, a scientific ignoramus, and there’s really no point in you being anything different. Just be you, and keep entertaining the rest of us.

Just Googling around, I’m amazed at all the "most important film" hoopla from people who don’t know a goddamned thing about "greenhouse" gasses, their effects, their possible causes, their possible benefits, the scale of the data, the scope of the data, the reliability of the data prior to the whole issue…and on and on.

For the 1% of you capable of getting through something that actually deals with the science scientifically, albeit completely inaccessible to sycophants like Micki Krimmel, then you could start with places like junkscience.com.

“V for Vendetta”

Haven’t read the book, but based on this excerpt,I might have to go take a look at the movie. Although, poking around, I see the movie version has been disowned by the book’s author. No surprise there.

Faking Courageous

When actors fake…

Writer, lawyer, actor, and economist Ben Stein notes that–with regard to the Oscar show the other night–"there was not one word of tribute, not one breath, to our fighting men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan or to their families or their widows or orphans.

I guess that since he’s an actor himself, he was uniquely perched to identify the narcissistic charade put on by Hollywood:

The idea that it is brave to stand up for gays in Hollywood, to stand up against Joe McCarthy in Hollywood (fifty years after his death), to say that rich white people are bad, that oil companies are evil — this is nonsense. All of these are mainstream ideas in Hollywood, always have been, always will be. For the people who made movies denouncing Big Oil, worshiping gays, mocking the rich to think of themselves as brave — this is pathetic, childish narcissism.

The brave guy in Hollywood will be the one who says that this is a fabulously great country where we treat gays, blacks, and everyone else as equal. The courageous writer in Hollywood will be the one who says the oil companies do their best in a very hostile world to bring us energy cheaply and efficiently and with a minimum of corruption. The producer who really has guts will be the one who says that Wall Street, despite its flaws, has done the best job of democratizing wealth ever in the history of mankind.

I advise everyone to not go holding their breath.

 

Brokeback to the Future

Perhaps the only thing funnier than the way the echo-chamber of Hollywood and its media sycophants are promoting Brokeback Mountain–reminiscent of an overly-defensive white guy exclaiming, "I like black people"–is this trailer for the upcoming release of Brokeback to the Future. (via Hit & Run)

I guess the other message is that you can make a movie trailer to be anything you want it to be. Don’t believe me? Remember the film The Shining? Yea? Well check out the trailer for this new release.

 

Goings On

Bea & I spent the weekend up in the cabin, by ourselves (other than the dogs, that is). It was a welcome change, seeing as two weeks prior, we had 19 people for New Year’s Eve, with 16 sleepovers (yea, bags all over).

This weekend was spent mostly watching DVDs. I had just done an Amazon run. First up was Downfall, the story of Hitler’s final days in his Berlin bunker in 1945. Bruno Ganz’s performance is amazing. For a film covering the sort of subject matter, it’s as good as such a film can possibly be. For those as meticulously interested in all things WWII as I, it’s a must see.

Some moths back, it caught my eye that George Lucas’ first film, THX 1138 was being released in DVD. Along about that time, Billy Beck had some interesting comments about the film, along with a link to a–what I was later to discover–spot-on article. See, I was 10 years old when I saw the film upon its release in 1971. Why did I see it? Because of the cool-looking car chase in the trailers showing on TV, of course. Needless to say, the film was a huge disappointment for a boy of 10. All I remember was white rooms, naked people, and bald heads. The car scene was about the last 10 minutes of the film. Boring. But I had to revisit it. Cinematically, it’s a very cool film. Seeing it now is to completely understand Lucas’ future success with the Star Wars franchise.

The message is unmitigated moronic crap; so typical of a complete know-nothing hippie of that era. In that vein, it can be seen as a monument to the general stupidity of the times. And, it puts the current state of politics in this country in complete context, since those elite of the times–such as those who might attend the UCLA and USC film schools, as a for-instance–are currently the ones fucking up America to the general point of no return.

There’s one single redeemable political message in the film. That is–and all you fiscal conservatives and consequentialists take heed–economic efficiency is quite perfectly at home in a totalitarian regime. So, all of you who argue fiscal restraint for the government, but don’t have your principles in order (freedom, for instance) are really just asking for a more efficient machine by which to oppress you.

Still, it’s really, really a beautiful film to watch and I recommend it. Oh, also, with the director’s cut DVD, you get a bonus disk with a bunch of stuff, including the documentary of the formation and early years of American Zoetrope. Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas were the main players, but you had various others directly and indirectly involved, many with names you’ll recognize, like Martin Scorsese. The most ironic part of that documentary is when it mentions, almost with pride, that neither Francis nor George were "political." Hey, no shit. I just got done watching THX. There’s a distinction to be made between the politically aware and spoiled brats who haven’t yet created a real dollar whining about how "corporations are destroying our way of life." The distinction can be many things, of course, but stupidity should never be mistaken for political awareness, and I daresay that it far too often is.

Next up was Conspiracy, an HBO film nearly documenting the 1942 Wannsee Conference in which Hitler’s "Final Solution" was legally engineered. Yes, that’s right: legally. Most of the attendees were lawyers or had studied the law. The legal basis was the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which laid the foundation for defense of the German race. There was a legal foundation and logical hierarchy to the whole thing. They were "defending their race." The 1935 laws were step one. Rounding the Jews up and putting them in ghettos, step 2. When that became problematic, emigration was attempted, but no one would take them; and moreover, with the anticipated successful conquest of Russia (there was optimism, even though German soldiers were freezing in the Russian winter at the time), their numbers were about to go from 6 millions to 11 millions of Jews. Since, after all, they are just legally defending their race, there was only one solution and that was the Final Solution.

Now, does that give anyone a better insight to what I mean when I say that laws and logic are meaningless–potentially evil–without a sound moral basis? And I don’t mean religious either. A religious basis can be just as deadly (and has been and is) as a we-the-people basis. Only an unequivocal, inviolable morality of absolute, unbridled individualism can protect against such evils. Without that, no one is ever really safe.

My favorite line from the film comes when one of the attendees (an SS Major who admits to "evacuating" 27,000 Jews) is asked about how he perceives his former study of the law. "It made me distrust the language. A gun means what it says."

Watched a few others, but none with the import of the aforementioned.

Pride and Prejudice

Beatrice & I walked down to Caper’s Loft Bar and Bistro last evening for a drink in the upstairs bar, then over to catch the 9:30 showing of Pride and Prejudice. Truth is, I’ve never paid much attention to Jane Austen, or her works, but I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed each of the 128 minutes of this film. Keira Knightly’s performance was just perfect as Elizabeth Bennett. Of Miss Bennett, Jane Austen once wrote:

"I must confess that I think her as delightful a
character as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able to tolerate those
who do not like her at least, I do not know."

It would be hard for me to grasp how that could not have been their guiding light in making this film. Go see it.

 

More on Moore

I just hate knowing that so many people I know and care for, even loved-ones, were insane and foolish enough to be taken in by that lying sonofabitch.

Michael Moore being shunned by the Oscars was certainly telling, but even more telling is what Moore’s former manager (who fired Moore) is saying about him, as documented in this San Francisco Examiner piece by Kathleen Antrim. Yes, Moore [is] now getting less. Good.

"Michael Moore makes a substantial living going into peoples’ private lives. Sneaking up on them," Urbanski said. So Urbanski feels no compunction in talking about the only client he ever fired. In fact, he fired Moore with a 10-page letter.

"A more dishonest and demented person I have never met," Urbanski wrote me in an e-mail, "and I have known a few! And he is more money obsessed than any I have known, and that’s saying a lot."

Urbanski believes that Moore hates America, hates capitalism and hates any normal concept of freedom and democracy. This seems odd, considering that if it weren’t for America, freedom and capitalism Moore’s brand of expression and capitalistic success would be impossible, if not illegal.

"Michael Moore could not withstand Michael Moore’s scrutiny for more than 15 seconds," Urbanski said.

My only hope is that certain people I know are a bit wiser next time around. You know what they say about being fooled twice.

Hollywood’s Useful Idiots

Well, I didn’t watch most of The Oscars last night, but I caught a bit of it. Clint Eastwood is as good as you get in Hollywood, and from what I know of him, he’s a real human being. Glad he took a couple of the top prizes. My wife & I just happened to see Million Dollar Baby the night before, and I’d recommend it. Glad to see Jamie Foxx get top actor for his unbelievable performance in Ray, my personal favorite film of the year.

But, of course, Hollywood is never in short supply of Useful Idiots. At Oscar time, it’s as veiled as they can make it. Hell, they even managed to keep that fat, obnoxious liar Michael Moore out of it entirely this year. So, I guess they had to make up for it elsewhere, and the natural place is to be found in the short films, documentaries, foreign language films, or obscure artsy fartsy films.

Did anyone notice what won best original song written for a motion picture? It’s called Al Otro Lado Del Rio and it’s from The Motorcycle Diaries. It was performed by Antonio Banderas singing and Carlos Santana on guitar. I thought it sucked, musically, in spite of Cosmic Carlos’ legendary talent. The performance was introduced by Salma Hayek, and rather than say that The Motorcycle Diaries is a film about two commies, one of whom was Che Guevara, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Cubans and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of other innocent people in Latin America, she said it was a film about "two idealists."

Damn, and I really liked watching Salma, too. Very pleasing to look at, and now all I’m going to see is another run of the mill Hollywood Useful Idiot.

Don’t Wanna Hear It

Thou dost protest too much

"Muslims are part of the fabric of this great country and are working to build a better America."

That very well may be, and I truly understand the difficulty one might have who is completely innocent (physically and spiritually), yet painted with a wide brush.

On the other hand, it’s just not a complaint I’m all that sympathetic to, and truth be told, I’m just not that interested in hearing about it.

Muslims in general could do one hell of a lot more to alleviate my own suspicions that many of them, though physically peaceful, morally support the actions of the terrorists. To the extent they do, they are every bit the enemy that those carrying out physical attacks are.

And yes, they have a moral duty to affirmatively condemn Islamic terrorism.

How Irrational Hatred Clouds Judgment

Wheel of Fortune’s Pat Sajak opines:

There’s another possibility; one that seems crazy on the surface, but does provide an explanation for the silence, and is also in keeping with the political climate in Hollywood. Is it just possible that there are those who are reluctant to criticize an act of terror because that might somehow align them with President Bush, who stubbornly clings to the notion that these are evil people who need to be defeated? Could the level of hatred for this President be so great that some people are against anything he is for, and for anything he is against?

There are things in the world that should be hated, indeed. But what does it mean to hate things like murder, rape, fraud–as well as the President of the United States? Should not hate be reserved for the truly evil, at risk of otherwise diminishing the moral value of the concept?

(tipped off by Greg)