Issue 182

News: This news item made me laugh more than any in recent times.
Folks, it's been a long time since I last updated this blog, and there's been a lot of news, and I think the best news in that time is Barack Obama officially declaring Operation Iraqi Freedom finished, leading to the eventual end of the war, actually doing something that contradicts my image of him as being a big letdown of a president. However, one other story I've found interesting has broken through recently; 39 grand-nephews of Adolf Hitler have been located, and their DNA has been analyzed. It has long been noted that Hitler fell far short of the "Aryan" ideal of blonde, blue-eyed supermen, but one result has been surprising: he had a rare gene called Haplogroup E1b1b1, that is most common among North Africans, and, (this is the kicker) Jews. So, in essence, Adolf Hitler, the man who probably made the most headway in the attempts to destroy the Jews, was, in fact, probably Jewish, and not only Jewish, but also possibly Black. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAAHAH!!!!! Surprisingly, the rumors that he was partly Jewish were long circulating that allegedly, Hitler's paternal grandfather was Jewish, but those rumors are believed to be just that among historians, and, of course, Hitler wouldn't have been accepted as a Jew, since the descent is maternal. However, if the information in the article is true, there must have been some Jewish blood somewhere along the line.

Film Idea of the Day: Pore Jud is Laiv (sic). Some time void opens up in the world of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma, and several characters are transported to the era when the film based on their lives is touring on the roadshow circuit. Several other contemporary films (the only ones I can think of right now being Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and The Searchers) suffer a similar phenomenon and eventually split into factions led by Jud and Curly (both from Oklahoma!,) and both are portrayed as anti-heroes, taking their characterizations in the film (as a lovesick drunk who may possibly be a serial killer, and the man who tries to get him to kill himself over a picnic basket.) I hope to give them something larger to fight about than a woman's affection if all the assorted companies that hold the copyrights will allow this Massively Multiplayer Crossover Event to exist.

Review of the Day: Downfall. Yes, this is the movie from which all the "Angry Hitler" clips came, and I'm probably one of the few people who was inspired to watch the movie due to the clips, and I still have to admit that, while it is one in a long line of German "scar films" that deal with the legacy of totalitarianism in their country, or countries, it is different in that, for the first time, Hitler himself is portrayed in a German movie as a human being and not a bogeyman lurking in the shadows. Don't get me wrong, even in this movie the Fuhrer is beyond pity (especially since he not only brags about the genocide he's committed, but also suggests a scorched-earth policy with regards to his own people), but in doing so, it ultimately reminds the audience that, as human as Hitler was, he was ultimately a truly degraded specimen, especially in those last days.

Link of the Day: Come on, you knew this one had to come.

Quote: "Your challenge is to write crossover fanfiction combining Chronicles of Narnia and World War II. The story should use a secret government plot as a plot device!"
_______________The Terrible Crossover Fanfiction Idea Generator, apparently unaware that Pan's Labytinth Already exists.

Tract Review: Stinky. An extremely dull Halloween tract, this one is mainly notable for being yet another incident of obvious self-promotion on Jack's part, with two kids being saved by a Chick Tract, and Satan going ballistic due to one smuggled into Hell.

Issue 181

News: MGM possibly going out of business: the Good and the Bad.
Well, one of the great American film studios has fallen on hard times, and because of that, it appears that there's only going to be 22 Bond films, and in addition, the film adaptation of The Hobbit will be at least put on hold, and I admit that if I gave a damn about fantasy movies in the first place, I would be galled by that. However, one other film that was more recently in the pipeline that is going to be affected by the studio's hard times is the remake of the 1984 film Red Dawn. I learned about the remake while I was setting up for a show at work, and I had a debate with my boss about whether it would be in any way plausible, and I doubted it was, and still do. In effect, the original, being about the invasion of Colorado by the Soviet army, would at least have made a little sense, perhaps it could have been seen as being a little bit plausible for anybody who grew up knowing Brezhnev as the leader of the USSR. Yes, the wisdom of one nuclear power leading an invasion of another is very suspect, especially considering that the invadee has no first-use policy, and the invader does(though nowhere near as stupid as unloading every nuclear weapon it has on a small coastal nation), but the fact that, at the time, Russia was an enemy of the USA at least gave the movie some credibility, even if, almost immediately after the film's release, things changed. However, in the remake, it's China who invades America. The problem is that making China the invader makes no sense in the current world situation, especially since, officially, China and America are neither allies nor enemies, things seem to point more strongly towards the former. To make an apt comparison, the Olympics before the original was released was in Moscow. We boycotted it. However, the most recent Olympics was in Beijing, and we didn't. I can imagine a movie like "Islamist Dawn," where Islamist militants from the Middle East manage to somehow take over the world could somehow work, even if the specifics of the invasion would almost certainly be as silly as that of the original, but the suspension of disbelief required to let Islamist militants on the other side of the world manage to be strong enough to take over is much less than that required to believe that China would actually feel the need to do it.

Film Idea of the Day: After writing a deeply insane children's book, an author of detective fiction is told to keep writing what made him famous, and his mind unravels as he writes it.

Film Review of the Day: Aisha. I was dragged into this movie yesterday. It was a Bollywood version of Jane Austen's Emma. Wow. A novel by an author I detest like a sickness in a genre I don't particularly care for. I was in for a treat. Sarcasm aside, Let me just do a capsule review.
Plot: It's just what you expect of it.
Music: Surprisingly for a genre known for its musicals, none of the music stays with you. Even the visuals for the musical numbers are utterly unremarkable.
Language: Pick a bloody language and stick with it! I can imagine using another language to "put on airs" or to communicate with someone from another country, but switching back and forth between languages at random just gets irritating. I suppose it's just annoying to me because I'm not from India, since it appears to be extremely common in Bollywood films.
Direction: Goes from being chaotic in the beginning to inept to just plain unremarkable. At several points, Rajshree Ohja tries to make montages, but especially in the shopping montage near the beginning, it seems more like she's just spiced frames out willy-nilly, or covering for damaged film stock. If this was done to disconcert the viewer (e.g. Natural Born Killers or Requiem For a Dream), this would have been Okay. However, in a musical romantic comedy for the proles of India, it makes no sense. As it turns out, the director seems to have made other films (I intend to review another film I hated, by a first time director, in the future), but, if IMDb is any indication, none of them were particularly consequential.

Quote of the Day: "Protestants

When I was watching a program (I believe on the History Channel) about Satanism, one person said basically that Catholicism represents all that the Devils is against (imagine that, Satanist might get along better with Catholics than most Protestants). [24.1]
I'm an atheist who agrees with Satanism as well, but I wouldn't tell that to my family. [24.2]
The word atheist may carry false connotations of being "immoral" or " that satanic ", and this of course is simply not true. [24.3]"
________________From the cPedia article on Satanism.

Link of the Day: C-Pedia. It's like Wikipedia, except the articles make no sense whatsoever.

Issue 180

News: The path of life is most uncertain...
I'm sorry that I haven't been posting more often, and not sticking to my three times a week schedule, but at this point, I'm not even sure whether I'll be able to post even twice a month at this point. And, I have to admit that my computer is the main reason for that. As I mentioned earlier, I sent it to Dell for repairs, but it turned out that there was one major problem they didn't fix: my AC jack had suddenly decided to work only at random times. There is little rhyme or reason as to when it works and when it doesn't. For instance, the first time I had to recharge the battery today, it took several tries before I was able to get it to charge, and I had to get it to lie flat with the screen parallel to my mattress, the bottom part propped up by a pillow. Amazingly, not only did it keep charging when I removed the pillow, I have not so far had any other problems getting the laptop to charge. And while the touchpad is not as sensitive as it once was, there is occasionally the opposite problem: it suddenly stops working completely. The cursor won't move and the buttons won't click. I told Dad about it and I hope he rectified the problem. Another, even more major problem is that, at least for a while, it seems as though the internet server downstairs just stopped working, but, as you may have noticed, Dad also helped to rectify that problem, and let's just hope that it works. Of course, perhaps all of these problems will work themselves out, and it's just my worry wart that's keeping me from updating pages. I really hope I'm wrong and I am able to post thrice this month, and in the future.

Film Review of the Day: Hot Fuzz. I recently got into this movie, primarily due the fact that I discovered that Doug Walker, aka The Nostalgia Critic, considers it to be, at least to him, the funniest movie of all time. In essence, it's a parody of the many "Buddy Cop" movies from the 1980s on, but with two differences: 1) It's British (which I think almost automatically puts it on a higher level of humor than American movies, since), and 2) The makers of the movie not only have established that they know their stuff not only about cop movies (unfortunately, even some parodists don't even seem to know the difference between parodying a movie, and just mentioning it; I'm talking to you, Seltzer and Friedberg), but they also know a lot about actual police officers in the flesh world, and inserted a lot of actual mannerisms of police officers into their by-the-book cop character Nick Angel, and that even some things that you'd think were just jokes were actually inspired by actual police officers.

Quote of the Day: "Well, I wouldn't argue that it wasn't a no-holds-barred, adrenaline-fueled thrill ride. But there is no way you can perpetrate that amount of carnage and mayhem and not incur a considerable amount of paperwork. "
_____________Nick Angel, Hot Fuzz.

Link of the Day: Surprisingly, there appears to have been a new series on TGWTG, where one of the gamers actually reviews some old, ultra-violent British Public Information Films (the British versions of PSAs, but often longer, and frequently more horrifying.) I'm not sure what's worse, that the Brits thought it was a good idea to create a Saw-like movie about kids dying on farms or that the reviewer seemed to see fit to remind me of how I've been driven into the internet trainwreck that is Sonichu [about 1:58 in]