V for Vendetta

This movie got a horrible reception when it came out, and I have to concur in that I really couldn't recommend it to anybody. However, it had a lot of merits, or perhaps more accurately, a lot of potential. The story of disobedience and revolt by the population of an authoritarian regime was extremely captivating. The importance of symbolism, fear, the way a population forgets history, and how any show of disrespect can undermine the authority of a regime, were all near perfect in their presentation, and with a surprisingly light touch, given some of the controversies invoked by the film.

What makes it ineffective is in a word, Hollywood, primarily through the casting. Any peripheral scene, or any scene where no credited cast member has a spoken line, is enthralling. When Stephen Fry and the girl with the glasses take off their masks at the end of the film, I nearly shed tears. The authoritarian regime is presented reasonably competently, if not terribly interestingly, with Stephen Rea's Inspector Finch the lone highlight as a man with the intelligence to dig deeper into his society's workings but not the courage or imagination. Stephen Fry I felt was absolutely perfect as the dilettante rebel, keeping illegal cultural artifacts and engaging in minor subversions well below the public radar, but believing nothing serious will ever happen to him.

Unfortunately, the lead actors are truly the stone that sinks this movie, by being such predictably poor casting choices. I even like the actors, Hugo Weaving and Natalie Portman, but they just don't have nearly the right presence. Casting Natalie Portman as Evey Hammond is obviously the Hollywood's need for everybody to be young and photogenic, but for Portman it comes out as wilting and fragile, and so exceedingly pliable and vulnerable, that she can't sell the transformation to fearless rebel. She really can't hold the screen with much better actors around her, and this kills a lot of scenes, having no real interaction between her character and others. It's still hard to even take her seriously as an adult, which worked exceedingly well for Closer where everybody pushes her around and talks down to her level, and was great when she was at her acting peak around age 12-13, but falls pretty far short here. Her English accent seems like a transparent affection, and in addition to being distracting, makes her again seem like the American kids who go to Oxford and try to assume a new identity, which again makes her seem like an adolescent. The other contenders for the role, Bryce Dallas Howard and Scarlett Johansson, I feel might have brought some more adult qualities to the role.

Hugo Weaving's breathless, otherworldly speaking voice may have contributed to the fact that he's best known for playing an elf and a computer program, but here it makes it hard to see that under the mask and the grandiose symbolism, V is just a pained, twisted man. This adds a lot when it does occasionally manage to poke through, so it would have been nice to see more of it. As it is, with nothing visible underneath in Weaving's performance, V comes across as a ridiculous shell, most clearly in the scene where V destroys the Old Bailey, and is standing on a rooftop with Evey reveling in the destruction. With his impassive Guy Fawkes mask, and just the black gloved hands sticking out of his flowing black cloak, and a low wall in front of him, he looked like a reject from that castle Trolley used to visit on Mr. Rogers, with the little puppets of King Friday and Prince Tuesday. It was incredibly hard to take him seriously after that, especially when he's making eggs and toast while wearing a grinning mask. If the original actor cast for the role, James Purefoy, had stuck through the film, I feel like he would have given a much better impression of a man under the mask, which is what the film needs to make V real and not ridiculous.

The film also makes great use of music, but again, Hollywood needs a dramatic score with violins playing to let them know what emotion to feel, and this is distractingly bland and cliche. Dario Marinelli's score really can't stand next to the songs that close the film, Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture and the Stones' Street Fighting Man, both of which are what the movie really called for. I also can't go without mentioning Dynamite Ham's "BKAB" featuring Malcom X and Gloria Steinem that apparently kept a lot of people glued to their seats during the closing credits. But it's classical music, political techno, and a song from two generations back, all of which I can see making nervous suits say "You didn't even give them a good bang at the end so they'd know
when to clap!"

This is also interesting in that it's the third Stephen Rea film I've seen, and like Colin Firth is always playing Mr. Darcy, he always seems to be channeling the spirit of Ned Broy. In "Michael Collins" he plays Ned Broy, an Irish policeman who becomes an informant for the Republicans after starting to listen to Collins, in "The Crying Game" he's an IRA volunteer who quits after conversing with a British soldier, and in "V for Vendetta" he's again a policeman who starts to question the regime after listening to V. He's also a Belfast Protestant who had three children with an IRA bomber who was part of the Dirty Protest and hunger strikes. Kind of interesting to find a Presbyterian from Belfast who keeps playing revolutionaries.

Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD

Initially, I really didn't get why there was even a conflict over the format of the next generation of optical media, the mode through which high definition video recordings could be sold. The primary advantage of seemed HD-DVD I understood to be that it's cheaper to run an assembly line that can switch from HD-DVD and normal DVD, which frankly didn't sound all that great. In terms of space, HD-DVD would also be a minor improvement over regular DVD, whereas a DVD holds multiple times what a CD can. Blu-Ray makes a much bigger jump, and like DVD, should allow more things that weren't possible in existing media. HD-DVD would have to be replaced with something else much sooner. Then I found out why HD-DVD is winning the format war: Sony is stupid.

Obviously we already knew this, with their stupid anti-piracy software their CDs secretly install on computers, and the exploding laptop batteries don't help. But they're at it again, announcing that they're selling the first Blu-Ray drives, which will be usable for storage, since they can read data from blu-ray discs. However, you won't be able to play Blu-ray movies on them, because they haven't sorted out what DRM they'll use, but they're selling the things anyways (you can burn a pirated movie onto a Blu-ray disc and play it on one of these drives, though). Seriously, Sony Electronics have a superior product, but are holding it back because Sony Media hasn't figured out how to break it yet. This has apparently happened multiple times in the US at least, with stuff like MiniDisc, which apparently the rest of the world thought was great but we missed out on. The Sony Playstation which got DVD players into a lot of homes won't play Blu-ray (not enough anti-piracy hardware), so nobody's going to buy Blu-ray discs because they have a player already. Meanwhile HD-DVD is showing signs of actually being available, like Netflix is planning on renting HD-DVDs.

The other stupid thing is Sony is limiting the licensing, to control who puts out content in their format. Having a Sony-only format that only plays on Sony equipment and is entirely controlled by Sony helped kill Betamax, but apparently it's better to lose money than to lose control. This explained one thing I'd really been curious about, why the porn industry was behind HD-DVD. Apparently it's because Sony doesn't want to allow any porn producers to put anything out on Blu-Ray. So basically they have an electronics product you can't buy anything for in the immediate future, that will only have limited content as time goes by, and a format that requires very specific DRM-capable equipment.

The great thing about all of this is, nobody can tell the difference. VHS to DVD is huge, DVD to high definition is... not so huge. The only thing that really blows your mind in high def is sporting events, and you can't really sell a lot of recordings of live sporting events. Also, there are formats with better compression already spreading that make the DRM'ed Sony format obsolete. However, the real irony is Sony has now put out a product that can only play pirated movies, that really brightened my day.

Vikings screwed early

Usually they start out strong and the wheels come off mid-season, or just whenever they play the Giants. Finally, a New York Football Giants free season, one I can enjoy without an impending sense of dread, and it's starting with terrible omens. They didn't look that great against the Raiders, but I figured I shouldn't read too much into that, but even that seems to be getting worse. Then the St Peter Police Department got involved.

The giant, glaring weakness in this team was the horrible, horrible play at linebacker, so the big off-season debate was whether they'd done enough to shore up those positions. Their first round draft pick was a highly rated linebacker, but after playing one quarter of a preseason game he's out for the whole year. This is following our new strong safety having a season-ending injury while backing up during training camp. So we'll still have the giant glaring hole in the middle of the field on defense... boy that linebacker we got for Moss was a great pick-up. Continued improvement on the defensive line would go a long way, but late in games the wide-open middle and sloppy tackling will apparently still negate the improvement of the line and the secondary the past few years. Don't get me started on how unbelievably bad our coverage teams were.

The talent level of our offensive skill position players has gone down, now that Moss and Culpepper are gone, but theoretically the offensive line should be a lot better, and the running game along with it now that they have a decent runningback who ranks football ahead of weed. On the other hand, the team's best receiver will probably spend the season in jail, after he led the St. Peter police department on a 100 mph chase to avoid a DWI. That certainly worked out well. I'd just like to point out once again, that for all the criticism of Randy Moss, he didn't miss entire seasons because of jail terms and failed drug tests, unlike other recent Vikings offensive starters. At least Tavaris Jackson looks like he might be the real deal at QB for next year.

This just doesn't look good... the improvements to the line and the running game may lead to the offense actually holding the ball long enough to keep our defense from collapsing late in games, which would be an improvement, but they're still not going to score on anybody. 3rd down is still going to be rough with wide open passing lanes across the middle, so the D isn't going to smother anybody either. Mediocrity abounds, and in a year we play the AFC East and the NFC West, I won't get to heckle my friends the Dolphin and 9er fans. I hope they look better by the opener against the Redskins. You know, I'm actually kind of glad that's a road game, I think spending the 5th anniversary of 9/11 with 64,000 people in a building with almost no exits would really unnerve me so much I wouldn't enjoy the game.

Starfleet Medical Ethics, and why I'd never use the EMH

In episode #130, "Pathfinder", Voyager is contacted through a new communications technology created by Lt. Reginald Barclay (better known as Howlin' Mad Murdock on the A-Team). At the end of the episode the crew toasts Lt. Barclay, and the captain asks if anybody knows him. The Doctor mentions that he read Barclay's file, and in a stunning lapse of professionalism, tells everyone about Barclay's amusing medical history (which includes phobias, addictions, and one time turning into a giant spider). Have his ethical subroutines just been corrupted, deleted, and rewritten so many times that after five and a half years they just don't even kick in anymore? Is his usual contribution to cocktail parties to tell everybody the 1st officer was a bedwetter?

I also assume that the file had a picture of the guy, so when the captain asked if anybody had a reference for the guy, you'd think that the Doctor would mention that in a sense they all sort of met him back in episode #10, "Projections", WHEN HIS HOLOGRAM TRIED TO STEAL THE SHIP. You'd think that would be something people would remember, the time Ferengi pirates sent a hologram from the alpha quadrant who charmed the whole crew before trying to murder them. It would also be a bit more appropriate than "Apparently he's sought extensive treatment for his crippling fear of transporters, what a freak." Granted, the Doctor's program had been rewritten or taken over by self-aware smart bombs and the like, and his holoemitter had been broken or embedded in the brain of a borg drone about 120 times in the intervening episodes, so maybe it's understandable he'd forget some things. Kind of makes you wonder what medical knowledge he's also forgotten though, doesn't it?

That being said, an indeterminate number of lightyears from Earth (the only explanation for their variable progress and the way people always catch up to them is if they went in the wrong direction most of the time) and if you get sick, your medical options are limited. You can go see the EMH whose medical ethics and long-term memory are intermittent, or you can see the other health care provider... an ex-con who was only halfway through his sentence for treason when he got pressed into service. I have to assume the replicators are working over time making vitamin C for a crew that's desperately afraid of going to sickbay.

Things that are not that great

There are in fact, some things that really aren't that great. I mean I'll readily admit they're good, I'm not a total idiot or anything, but they're just... not that great.

CSI, for instance, is really not that great. I've only seen a couple episodes of this show, but I've discovered that apparently everything in Las Vegas is covered in semen. Car accident? Better check the driver for semen just to be sure. I don't have a problem with people apparently going at it on every available surface, I'm really all for that, I mean sometimes the only thing you can find to cuff a woman to for sex and spanking is going to be playground equipment. Er, for example. Crowbarring in a few juvenile sexual references (like I just did) isn't really that big a deal, I mean SVU has hit some groaner moments like the lawyer moonlighting as a stripper, which wouldn't have been so stupid if it wasn't for the "feel of men's eyes" soliloquy by a coworker. These were like the first heterosexual strippers I've ever heard of, but that's another story. The thing with CSI is the constant attempts at momentous lines, obviously inspired by the Jerry Orbach teaser quip from like, every Law&Order episode ever. The one that finally did it for me was the guy who really caught Hannibal Lecter talking about roller coasters: "You see, for me it's not about the track. It's about the thrill." As opposed to the people who ride for the #@%&'ing scenery, but since it's in an amusement park full of vomiting kids and flashing lights in an otherwise vacant splotch of blacktop, I'm guessing the scenery really isn't all that great.

Kyle Lohse was also not that great. I'm not knocking Lohse, I'm just saying he... well, I'm saying he wasn't that great. He had years to turn into a quality starting pitcher for the Twins, and the Twins have done well by trying to keep talent coming up through the minor league organization. So they ship out guys like Kyle Lohse and Doug Mientkiewicz who have no future, with the Twins pitching prospects and Morneau-for-4 having a better trade-off of offensive and defensive skills at first base. Everybody tends to agree that keeping talent flowing into the minor league organization has worked, but there were grumbles about Lohse and Mientkiewicz, both because of a perceived lack of value in the trades, and because of a sense that a play-off run was being hurt in order to build for the future. Here's the thing... Kyle Lohse wouldn't pitch in the play-offs anyways, and if the margin of victory in making the wild card spot is Kyle Lohse winning as a starter, you really aren't going to win the world series. The same thing went for Mientkiewicz, he was superlative at the sport's easiest job to fill (playing first base), but it's unlikely you'll notice a huge difference between him and his replacement, so it's better to go with somebody that can hit. This meant the Twins could likely make better use of the roster spot by promoting somebody from the minors, even if they got nothing for Lohse and Mientkiewicz. Nobody wanted Lohse or Mientkiewicz enough to offer a lot in return, since they had few marketable rare abilities. Getting them out of the way of minor league talent and stocking up a bit more in the minors was good business, because they weren't that great.

Seinfeld? Not that great, I'm afraid. Here's the proof, the legacy of Seinfeld is in the concepts, the banal things that were formalized and exaggerated to comedic proportions, like the implied agreement of tupperware when formalized and applied to giving food to the homeless. The thing is, you don't actually have to see the episode to appreciate the observational humor, and I've recently come to the conclusion that it actually helps not to watch the actual episodes. Part of Seinfeld was the narcissism and lack of empathy of all the characters, which was supposed to be funny at their expense, but that aspect really misfired a lot. Generally they're just being cheap and petty, and obsessively so. Is there a shortage of people like that, because I don't think there is one that justifies broadcasting a daily fix of them. Like George freaking out for the entire episode about how he has to chip in for a $12 bottle of wine and a dessert to bring to a dinner party, in my experience there are actually plenty of people who are that cheap and aggravating, so it's really not funny. The show is popularly recognized as having jumped the shark when they took that same attitude too far, and nobody cared when George's fiancee died. Eventually the show even had to recognize this and punish the characters for their narcissism in the series finale. The physical comedy and intermittent yelping by Kramer only works in small doses, so if you watch two episodes back to back, it's immediately clear why Michael Richards' schtick didn't outlive this show. Also, George being depressed and pathetic, an intermittent running theme, is not great escapist entertainment for me, for some odd reason.

Big Slick is also surprisingly not that great. You'd think it would be, you really would, but it seems like whenever somebody throws away most of their chips, they went in with Big Slick, and they're not happy about it. The idea is that playing Texas Hold'em, there are only two starting hands that dominate Big Slick, Bullets and Cowboys. Against any other pair, it's even money before the flop. However, it's always the hand where people get fucked in crazy ways, like making trips on the flop then losing to the Wheel. It's just not that great is all I'm saying. Also not that great is when the short stack picks up fishhooks and goes nuts figuring it's time to make their last stand, because they always get chewed up by a bigger pair.

Obviously I'd also have to include poorly edited gonzo porn. Often poor editing means holding the same stable shot for so long that you see the point when the performers have to kind of mentally start the loop over, like shift their weight and shake out tired muscles before going back to the same mechanical motion. What also stands out in this process is the mental reboot, where somebody stops moaning, looks irritated and bored, then starts a new series of moans. The close-up anatomical shots, much as I love them, if held for so long that they start to lose any cohesion with the rest of the scene, and become just clinical, well, they're not so great. I will happily admit to loving gonzo porn, but when you point a camera at it and nod off, so does the audience.

Once on top of the world, but now just not so great anymore, the Beckhams. David's limitations really stood out during the World Cup, since he can't get past fullbacks, can't keep up with his assignment on defense even on set pieces, and is into the phase of his career when his speed and endurance will continue to drop drastically while he takes longer and longer to recover from more frequent injuries. His England career is over, since his sole contribution at international level is set pieces and the occasional long ball or cross if the whole defense sags off of him, like a Steve Kerr 3-pointer. He is likely to be dropped from Real Madrid's first team, and his wife's shopping and nightlife needs mean he's got two options, some second-rate London club like Tottenham Hotspur or... well actually just Spurs, or he can admit he's past it, and sign up with Red Bull New York or the LA Galaxy, and tap new markets for his image. Then again, he and his wife were booed at an MTV awards show, and got tossed again when they demanded that an LA store throw out the plebs so they could shop without being mobbed, were asked by management, "Who the fuck are you and why would we do that?" Actually, is he even that attractive to androphiles anymore, with his goofy personal grooming and body art choices? Which brings me to Posh, whose career ended eight years ago. The end of her husband's international career means she's not the leader of the Wags (Wives and Girlfriends) that traveled the length and breadth of Germany to the embarrassment of normal people all over England. (On an etymological note, Wags is a plural noun with no singular, since a lone member of the Wags is a wife or a girlfriend, not a Wag.) What was really sad was on all the endless cuts to her in the stands looking like an old lady with her over-sized sunglasses, sitting next to her and stealing all my attention was Ashley Cole's girlfriend Cheryl Tweedy looking hot, completely outshining the queen bee Posh, who looked by comparison, well, not that great. Although apparently Cheryl backs up the idea that Posh isn't nearly as useless as most of the other Wags, and with her understanding of how to work the media Becks went from that guy with the hair in his eyes who kicks people to international sex symbol.

What's really also not so great are top five and top ten lists and the like, because it's so hard to be definitive, exhaustive, and self-conscious in form all at the same time. Particularly not so great is this list. It's long-winded without any sort of structure, which makes it difficult to read and impossible to scan for relevant highlights, which given the completely random set of topics makes it unlikely the one or two people who might consider reading it will get anything out of it. I mean no section subheadings, no numbers, just long, undistinguished paragraphs of morose, possibly bitter-sounding prose? Reworking sections to avoid the impression of the usual hysterical, ranting style of my emails and blog posts would have been great, but I didn't do it, so perhaps that is also not really so great. Boring and cryptic sections up front like the entry that doesn't even identify what Big Slick refers to, and continues with more nicknames like presto, I mean that can't be too great. And really, with the volumes I could write about gonzo porn and its undeserved negative image, to just mention the bad instead of writing a spirited exploration of its merits, well, even I think that wasn't too great a thing for me to do. Boy would I ever owe my readers an apology if I had any.

American Citizenship Test

1. If you catch a home run ball in the top of the 9^th, what do you do with the ball after the game?

a) Wait around until after the game to get it signed by the hitter

b) Give it to a kid

c) Take it home and give it to your brother-cousin

d) Nothing, because you threw that piece of shit back onto the field!

2. Ulysses S Grant was a general in:

a) The Spanish-American War

b) The War of 1812

c) The War of Northern Aggression

d) The Civil War

3. America's best cultural export is:

a) Hawaiian shirts

b) Detroit Automobiles

c) Texas football

d) Chicago Blues

4. The French are best described as:

a) A historical ally whose support was critical to a US victory at Yorktown

b) A former colonial power with crucial political influence in Africa and Russia

c) Cheese-eating surrender monkeys we keep having to bail out of wars

d) All of the above

5. The electoral college system is:

a) An 18^th century vision of government that should have been abolished by the 17^th amendment

b) An undemocratic system that favors regional, rural and agrarian politics

c) The Founding Fathers' way of keeping black lesbian communists from screwing up the country

d) What the hell is the electoral college?

6. Which best describes Canada:

a) A G7 nation and parliamentary republic with its own unique blend of immigrant cultures

b) A bland, humorless snowdrift with 30 million Napoleonic complexes

c) The 51^st State

d) All of the above

7. Which of the following American contributions to world cuisine is edible:

a) The McDonald's Happy Meal

b) Velveeta slices

c) Possum fresh off the grill (if you know what I mean)

d) Pumpkin Pie

8. What do the 4^th and 5^th amendments protect Americans from?

a) Unreasonable searches and intrusion by the police

b) Being forced to turn over evidence against themselves

c) Getting cornholed by gay rapist French communist university professors

d) A and B, but only if you're not a terrorist

9. South of the United States one would find:

a) Mexico

b) The Republic of Texas

c) Lazy people who want to hike across a desert to work two jobs (lazily)

d) Señor Frog's

10. If somebody says something you don't like, what does the Constitution say about that?

a) Everyone has a right to free speech (1^st amendment)

b) Everyone is entitled to the same rights under the law (14^th amendment)

c) Shoot the bastard! (2^nd amendment)

d) A and B, as long as you support the President and not the terrorists (Bush & Nixon Administrations)

Bonus Question:

Which of the following people is truly an American hero who risked his or her life for freedom:

a) Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox

b) Ralph Hinkley, the Greatest American Hero

c) Jessica Lynch, that baby Osama bin Laden threw down a well in Iraq

d) G.I. Joe, a Real American Hero

Scoring:

Add up the number of times you answered “D” here:

American Index _____

If you have an American Index of 7 or higher, congratulations! You are sufficiently American, and you can stay as long as you want.

Add up the number of times you answered “C” here:

Redneck Index _____

If you have a Redneck Index of 3 or higher, yee-haw! You are a Red State American, and you have 30 days to relocate south of the Mason-Dixon line.

The Wicker Man

I just finally saw a trailer for the Nicholas Cage remake of The Wicker Man. Creepy supernatural people keep turning into bees and flying away, so obviously this isn't a faithful remake of the original film, which retains a healthy amount of skepticism through Edward Woodward. The thing is, amping up the horror with all this goofy shit with the girl having glowing red eyes on the poster, etc. would actually makes the movie a lot less scary than the original, because it establishes before you even get to the theater that it's all fantastical and not grounded in reality. There can be no dawning sense of horror as Nicholas Cage figures out what's going on, because there's already people turning into clouds of bees (or maybe it was flies) in the trailer.

The very act of casting Nicholas Cage also means the movie has to give him a very different character, because Edward Woodward's devout Protestant virgin from the original just isn't an A-list actor popcorn movie character: Nick Cage has to be much more world-weary, cynical, and imply hot sex with every breath. The characterization in the original allows for the tension and revulsion of Woodward towards the people of the island in the original, and lets him stay a detective fiction character who's stumbled into a ghost story and is having none of it, thank you very much. In my opinion the gut punch of the original film comes from the way detective stories and horror stories begin the same way, before diverging, and people bursting into clouds of bees kinds of blows that.

According to what I've read, the remake apparently decided to make the tension between the policeman and the people of the island not be over Christianity versus paganism. Instead, it's about gender, because being an authority figure as a policeman, Nicholas Cage will represent the patriarchy of the outside world, versus the matriarchy of the island. Unfortunately, female antagonists subjecting men to horror doesn't work too well, because half the audience needs it to be a girl power moment, so they can't follow through, unless she's a cartoonish villain in an action movie. If you think it's just me being paranoid, see Amber Benson talking up the empowerment moment of Kathy Bates crippling a man with a sledgehammer in Misery in that 100 scariest movie moments special. Somebody taking pride in that was the creepiest part of the whole show. That and the numerous times I've heard about peer reviewed studies of matriarchal societies show them to be free of violence and social inequality, without any being named (studies or societies) kind of leads me to believe they'll be toothless in this version as well.

My assumption is once again, we'll get a remake that totally missed what made the original stick in anybody's head for 30 years. With most of these remakes, we already know the story, and where the originals were suffused with the politics and culture of the day, the remakes substitute cartoonish versions of the same issues, which are safe and do nothing to unnerve modern audiences. You don't address today's issues, you look back at the attitude of 30-40 years ago so the audience all agrees and you don't take any chances. (I may have made fun of the hamfistedness of it, but the X-Men movies did actually engage with some of modern society's areas of discomfort.)

But with the commercial remakes, exploiting known properties, you get the remake of the Stepford Wives that had the women better off as robots in the end, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre without meat packers, Dawn of the Dead without Vietnam or race relations, The Hills Have Eyes without nuclear testing, and even though it's not horror The Manchurian Candidate without the original's Cold War paranoia. What stood out as an exception last year was Land of the Dead (a possible parable of Red State America) but that's because it was made by George A. Romero, who was active when these movies were about more than having Michael Berryman jump out and say "Boo!" Even Count Chocula has a fascinating subtext of antisemitism that makes Mel Gibson look open-minded and tolerant. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to burst into a cloud of hornets and go build a nest on somebody's balcony.