Issue 202

News: Definite Hiatus in Updates.
You may notice that in the past eight months, I only posted four times. One post every two months. Now, it looks like I'm going to have to do some definite changes in when I update. As I mentioned earlier, I'm currently enrolled in Columbia College Chicago. Now, my workload is even heavier than usual. Right now, I have several stories that I need to write, a big creative essay on Crime and Punishment, a presentation on Bret Easton Ellis, a full-length one act play, and an essay on art in the Weimar Republic. As a result, I have decided to put this blog on an indefinite hiatus until the semester is over, and I will most likely put it back on when school comes back in September, even if my workload will be lighter than it is now. I simply cannot update the blog with any regularity with all this happening. I apologise to all the people following my blog, all five of you. But now that I've got that out of the way, I'd like to write the reviews for two films I've wanted to see.

The Adventures of Tintin: I've been a big fan of the Tintin series for years, and I've been excited to see it come out for a long time. Let me put it this way, while I was in my first semester in Fall 2008, this film was being shot. It only came out in December 2011, and I waited all that time to see it. How was it? It was pretty good. Even the motion capture looked pretty good. Spielberg fulfilled the promise to make it look like the characters were "real people, but real Herge people." And speaking of the characters, the acting is incredible. Jamie Bell's Tintin in particular is better than I could have imagined, he even manages to say the phrase "Great snakes!" with conviction I didn't know was possible. Surprisingly, Nick Frost and Simon Pegg voice Thomson and Thompson, but, despite the pair starring in one of my favourite comedies, Hot Fuzz, their performance didn't play that up too much. The plot is based on two albums, Crab with the Golden Claws, and The Secret of the Unicorn, and the script really does its hardest to streamline the two into one consolidated story, and even though it ends on a sequel hook, which I normally hate, it is justified because the sequel is definitely being made now. There were a few things I didn't really like about it: 1) Why does the model of the Unicorn catch Tintin's eye? In the original, he thinks it would be a good gift for Haddock, but since they don't meet until halfway through the movie, why? 2) The plan to steal the third model of the Unicorn is just insane: the model is displayed under bulletproof glass in direct sunlight (Just look at The Last Supper to see the impact of sunlight on valuable art), and so they hire Bianca Castafiore to perform with the ship behind her so it can shatter when she reaches a high note (while it's possible [if hard] to do this for regular glass, it really can't be done for Bulletproof glass.) This would be a miinor quibble, but considering that Herge did his damnedest to research his stories, it just seems out of place. 3) Why doesn't Bianca Castafiore sing her trademark "Jewel Aria"? Or are they saving that for the sequel?

We Need to Talk About Kevin: This book really is the story not of Kevin Khatchadourian, the school shooter, but of his mother Eva, and if you had any doubts about that reading the book, watch the movie. It's her show; Tilda Swinton stars and gives an amazing performance, and, in the scenes that are supposed to be set in the "present-day," she works so masterfully with silence that if The Artist spawns a new wave of silent films, she should definitely make a career with that. The major problem I have with the movie is its amazingly slow pacing; the first scene has what can only be called a "Ragu orgy," and, due to its relatively non-linear structure, it takes about ten minutes before anything identifiable from the novel is on screen. When I say the structure is non-linear, I mean it goes between two plots; one set in the "present-day," where Eva has to cope with her life after the loss of her family (original to the film), and the other dealing with how her son turned into a killer. While a lot of incidents were cut out, it's still fairly easy to piece the events together, although reading the book may help. The cast is pretty good, except for John C. Reilly. He's way too much of a nonentity in this film to be believable as Kevin's "favourite" parent.

Tract Review: Global Warming: Jack decides to take on Global Warming. He spends half the tract ridiculing scientists who predicted catastrophes, and then decides that they're actually right, at least in that the world is ending, but at least Jack doesn't make the mistake of setting any dates. Highlights: someone who looks like Al Gore with a pencil-thin moustache insults his TV audience; in the latest display of Jack actually being knowledgable about secular culture, the cast of Young Frankenstein causes global warming; Jack's remarks about Nostradamus show that he apparently didn't watch television in 1999 (going by the Pinky and the Brain clones in The Awful Truth, he might have been upset by the show's cancellation the previous year); polar bears and vultures coexisting peacefully; a teamster broke into the wrong protest; in the biggest "WTF" moment Jack has brought to us since "Moving on Up," he claims that climatologists pray to the Mayan gods and Gaia (represented by a Venus of Willendorf, pixellated for your protection); some people of different religions share their incoherent opinions of Christ (like he "had a devil" or "was queer"); and God is responsible for global warming because he's a sociopath with no more regard for his followers than Alexander DeLarge.

Link: Another site that dissects Chick Tracts.

And now, the next 25 in my list of life lessons.

1. Korn will never top “Daddy.”
2. If I ever do get Jeremy Irons to sing a song entitled “You're f***ing a mutant,” there will be thousands of comments asking “Is this 2008?”
3. As Gabriel Byrne has shown, plate armour is not a good contraceptive.
4. If the question is “A or B,” the answer is “Yes.”
5. Nobody makes wicker toilets.
6. God does not hate lamp.
7. Given that in its original context, it is a prelude to both mass murder and the breakup of the people getting married, there are few pieces of music less suited for being played at weddings than Wagner's Bridal Chorus.
8. Except for “And I Will Always Love You.”
9. Just because you don't believe in God doesn't mean you can't become a minister and be legally entitled to add the title Rev. to your name.
10. There is actually a dance song where one of the moves is “sleep!”
11. My name is not Mr. B. Elzebub.
12. Nobody really listens to each other, and they probably never did.
13. There is no such thing as a homeless-sexual.
14. A Day at the Races did not predict the Rwandan genocide.
15. So many great works of art could have been averted if the characters had any goddamn sense.
16. No more digging up Billy Mays' grave without bringing a Necronomicon ex Mortis.
17. Until cannibalism is made legal, veal is the next best thing.
18. Many films could be improved with the addition of a character with a talking body part.
19. If you can't make the connection between Air Force One and the Air Force, you have no business writing political thrillers.
20. Sam Shepherd learned to fly a plane for The Right Stuff, and also learned to survive while riding on the plane's roof during a supersonic flight.
21. Satan does not answer to the name “The one whose little path would make me sad.”
22. No bucket list is complete without a major societal taboo.
23. The Insane Clown Posse was more fun when they were just rapping about over-the-top sex and violence and not just being idiots.
24. For the man who is seeking the affections of the 12-year old cancer girl: I would strongly suggest you get the help you need. I'm not that messed up. At least, I hope not.
25. It is better to be a fool than to be a Lear.

Issue 193

News/Review: Ken Park: The review.
Recently, I discovered a new reviewer on the That Guy With The Glasses site I frequent. His name is OANcitizen, and his show is called "Brows Held High." His particular niche is reviewing bad Art-House and Independent films, showing that, yes, even in the case of Art House films, Sturgeon's Law, that 90% of everything is crap, still stands. One film in particular he reviewed is something that particularly struck me: Ken Park, the undistributed opus of filmmaker Larry Clark. For the record, Larry Clark is a filmmaker infamous for starting out as a photographer for most of his life (including a book which apparently inspired Taxi Driver) until going into film in 1995 with Kids. I have seen his films all the way up to this one, and the first three were particularly disquieting looks at the inner lives of teenagers. Ken Park, however, not so much, as somewhere between Bully and Ken Park, Clark seems to have discarded any regard for narrative. The film is split into five stories, each focusing on a member of a group of friends. Before one asks, the five stories are tied only in two ways: a photograph of the five, and a gratuitous three-way involving three of them.
1- Ken Park. The lead character of the film, only appears in two scenes: one at the beginning where he goes to a skateboarding park to shoot himself, and one near the end where Clark reveals that he did it because he impregnated his girlfriend, who isn't part of the five.
2- Shawn. This segment is essentially like a porno, except with better production values and hardly any set-up. Simply put, he propositions his girlfriend's mother, and she obliges him. There's hardly any conflict in this segment.
3- Claude. A skateboarder is abused by his muscle-headed father, who is also attracted to him. The dad is played by TV's Patrick the Starfish. You will never look at SpongeBob the same way again. For that matter, after reading up on the newer episodes of the show on TVTropes, and how everybody involved became unlikable, I'll never look at that show the same way again.
4- Peaches. An Asian girl tries to hide her sexual proclivities from her Fundamentalist father. She fails and he marries her. It'd probably be better to swallow if she wasn't of a race commonly portrayed as promiscuous in media.
5- Tate. He is a man who hates his grandparents for no real reason (they never do anything worse than pass off "Sibi" as a word in Scrabble during the whole film.) After doing a lot of unpleasant things, like abusing his dog or... what I will call "rehearsing for a play of the death of David Carradine or Michael Hutchence." Unlike some of the other graphic nude scenes in his previous films, Clark doesn't even try to integrate it into the story proper (even what little there is), and thus the story grinds to a halt. Then, he kills his grandparents while nude and gets arrested.
Simply put, I'm sure that if somebody else could remake the film, especially if they replaced a lot of the sex (Nobody thinks that American film boards should let their hair down more than I, but in this case, there's no real point) with proper character development and plot, who knows? Maybe it could even get a distributor in America, and if I ever meet Larry Clark, I am seriously considering telling him this, perhaps going so far as to talk about directing it myself.

Tract Reviews: That's Baphomet: A Masonic couple has their son attempt suicide. After being lectured on the dangers of Masonry, their son survives.
Still No Revival: Essentially a 50th Anniversary Retrospective tract, somehow managing to incorporate his fear of Muslims, Catholics, and non-King James Bibles. Interestingly enough, he even manages to, for the first time since he incorporated one of Laugh-In's many catch-phrases into one of his early tracts (with the possible exception of the tracts that talk about Harry Potter or Dungeons and Dragons, which don't count because he made abundantly clear that he doesn't understand a thing about either one), he actually shows some awareness of popular culture: He shows a family watching Family Guy.

Issue 190

News/Review: Phantom Tollbooth: Book v. Movie.
A few weeks ago a big blizzard struck, as any midwesterners reading it would know. (What much is there to say about the blizzard itself? There was a massive amount of snow and I had to shovel it.) Just before the blizzard struck, I managed to get a book both in dead tree and audio editions, after discovering that Thirty H's apparently included an allusion to it an episode with a .58 child in Chapter 6. and most of the time I spent shoveling it, I had spent listening to the audiobook version. That book was Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth. Quite honestly, I think it's one of the best kids' books I've ever read, and my only regret is that I hadn't read it as a kid myself, and after listening to the interview with Norton Juster on the audiobook, I regret not having read it as a teenager, either, since, according to him, many people have written to him talking to him about how they read the book as children, teenagers, and as adults, and that it seemed like a different book each time. As it turns out, there will apparently be a new hardcover edition for its fiftieth anniversary in November (something I'd like come December), and I find it very likely that when I write my "Best Books of the Many I read in 2011" list next year, I am almost certain that it will be in the top five at least. And so, in honor of this, I must inform you that there is actually a film adaptation from the early seventies directed by Chuck Jones, which recently received its first DVD release through Warner Archives. But unlike some other films which took a ridiculously long time to come to DVD (like Wise Blood or The African Queen), there is a very good reason that it took this long: Simply put, it's bad. It's not a faithful adaptation at all. Needless to say, I've written two previous posts about film adaptations of books that changed some things significantly from their source material, but unlike Watchmen, where Zack Snyder did what he could to keep the film at a manageable length, and the 1959 version of the Brothers Karamazov, which attempted to reduce an 800-page novel into a 2 1/2 hour film by stripping away almost every subplot not directly related to the murder of Fyodor at the expense of many major characters. This film, directed by no less an animation god than Chuck Jones of Looney Tunes fame, has no excuse. The film's character designs are pretty good, even if they do deviate significantly from Jules Feiffer's illustrations (at this point, my main qualm about this aspect of the film is the fact that Tock the Watchdog's watch seems to be tucked into some sort of pouch on its body, and apparently downplaying the fact that he is supposed to be a "Watch Dog" with a real watch on his body. The fact that his voice actor is pretty bland doesn't help matters.) The film's major problem is with its pacing. It seems to be good in the opening scenes (where Milo manages to say the opening paragraphs of the book to a friend over the phone, thus finding a pretty good vehicle for putting the exposition in without the use of a narrator. However, after the scene in the Doldrums, the film begins to dramatically change from the book. Namely, in the book, after leaving the Doldrums, Milo and Tock head straight on to Dictionopolis, and then, after learning of the story of how the princesses Rhyme and Reason were cast out, decide to quest for them (with The Humbug, another character from Dictionopolis who lost much of his distinctive character in the film, drafted into joining by King Azaz the Unabridged), with several episodes following on the way. On the other hand, the film features Milo and Tock managing to encounter many of the people they found in the book long before they managed to get to Dictionopolis (on the one hand, there's nothing that wasn't in the book, but on the other hand, there was no 0.58 child anywhere in the mix). Needless to say, by the time the film finally gets around to giving the film its backstory about two-thirds of the way into the film (That's right. Important backstory that is supposed to set up the main plot of the book doesn't even get introduced into the film itself for about sixty minutes into the film's ninety-minute running time) there isn't much left for Milo, Tock, and the Humbug to do. It's like making a remake of Rain Man where most of the antics Charlie and Raymond get into happen in Cincinatti before they finally go to L.A. Yes; It would have been as poor a film as the real version is a poor depiction of autism. One more problem I have with the film is the treatment of the ending; in the book, as Milo drives away after reuniting the Mathemagician and King Azaz the Unabridged, they both remind him to remember the importance of words and numbers. This restarts the argument the two had been having about which one is more important that led to the imprisonment of Rhyme and Reason. With the disappearance of the Tollbooth from Milo's room, and the note that came with it, it implied heavily that the book's plot would happen again with some other bored child in Milo's place. In my opinion, this was a pretty effective twist ending. However, the film does not give any such implication. It's just a more simple "happily ever after" ending. Granted, the tollbooth still vanishes, and it even goes to the kid Milo was talking to on the phone. Unfortunately, by leaving out that little scene, Chuck Jones has managed to strip the scene of some crucial context making it poorer than the book's version. Simply put, if Chuck Jones had decided to keep the Book's structure, and maybe bite the bullet and add a few more scenes to make it longer than 90 minutes, it would have been a better film. However, he didn't, and I had enough material to rant about for quite a while.

Tract Review: There's two new tracts on Jack Chick's website, but they're both new versions of old tracts. One is a new version of "This Was Your Life," entitled "You Have a Date." The main differences are that the protagonist is now female, and instead of telling dirty jokes, has apparently had a lesbian experience as a teen. In addition, Jack seems to have realised that claiming whispering is a sin (as he did in previous versions of this tract) is idiotic. The other new tract was a new version of "The Attack" changed with a plug for a new book which no doubt regurgitates many of these arguments.

Issue 187

News: The Beat Books of (the many I read in) 2010.
Well, I've seen a few more films in theaters than I did last year. All things noted, however, I read a lot of books in the last year. How many, you may ask? Well, my original shortlist for this one happened to be 25 books. It took a while for me to be able to narrow it down to ten. And here's just the ten I felt were the best I had read, and no, none of them had been published in 2010.

10. Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser.
For the benefit of all of you who don't know, Harry Paget Flashman was the bully in the Victorian schoolboy's novel Tom Brown's Schooldays. This novel covers his life in the years after being expelled from Rugby school for drunkenness, wherein he joins the army and manages to gain some clout by shooting the top off a bottle (by complete accident), and gaining a heroic reputation (culminating in meeting Queen Victoria) in India despite being a total coward. The thing that really interested me was that it was apparently so historically accurate that, upon publication, several reviewers (particularly Americans) assumed that they were genuine. It's the first in a series of twelve novels, and I have yet to read the other eleven, but I can only expect more of the same.

9. If Chins Could Kill by Bruce Campbell.
On the prodding of a classmate in my recent film class, I decided to read this book. I hesitated, because of the fact that I never went in for the "private lives of the stars" sort of books. However, unlike most of the stars who've had books written about them, Bruce, at least at first, had a pretty hands-on role in the making of many of the films. He includes a setup for some of the camera tricks devised for the Evil Dead movies and even a recipe for blood used in the original. The classmate who recommended this to me also suggested I try and make that fake blood and see if it's edible, but I haven't. That said, considering that all the ingredients are edible, I think it is, but doubt that it would be appetising.

8. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson.
This movie is probably one of the most frequently adapted novels in history, but, surprisingly, very few of those adaptations even bothered to take the original plot structure from the original. The more I looked into the adaptations, I found only two filmed versions that kept the original idea: 1971's I Monster, which changed the protagonist's names, and the Wishbone adaptation that squished the story into 15 minutes and made the main character a dog. And by main character, I mean Gabriel Utterson, who is, for some reason, left out of almost every adaptation. Why? After all, it's a perfectly good idea to let the audience figure out what had happened slowly, and at least make an effort of making it seem like the fact that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person was a twist. The fact that so many adaptations decided to establish early on that Jekyll and Hyde are one and the same is just as idiotic an idea as making a version of The Sixth Sense where everybody knows up front that the Bruce Willis character is supposed to be a ghost. Of course, like with Flashman, I had read this on audiobook, and there were some flaws with both of them: With Flashman, the footnotes were not read (the ones which reinforced the massive amount of research Fraser put into them), and for this one, the narrator mispronounced Jekyll's name. As much as I like Spencer Tracy, I blame him (and his 1940 film of the book) for the popular mispronunciation of Jekyll as Jeck-ull. According to Stevenson, it was Jee-kull. Rant over, on to book 7.

7. The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran and the Dhammapada.
What else is there to say about The Prophet? Behind Lao-Tsu, Shakespeare, and King David, this book is one of the most-read collections of poetry in recorded history. And, the fact is, his musings on the condition of living still hold up pretty well. He has succeeded in becoming timeless. I also include the Dhammapada in the same category because its subject is the same as the Prophet, but it was written by an actual religious figure. In short, it's probably one of the most solid-seeming religious texts, in my opinion.

6. Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris.
Well, this is a book about the making of a great man, namely, Theodore Roosevelt. This is the first part of a three-volume biography of Roosevelt, and this volume covers his life from birth to getting the news that President McKinley got assassinated, and it's surprising the amount of positions he managed to get before the age of 42, from published author, to secretary of the Navy, to war hero, to NYPD Commissioner, to personification of masculinity. I read Theodore Rex, the second volume, and I didn't find it as interesting as the first volume, and I have yet to read the last volume, Colonel Roosevelt, (due to wanting to get paperback edition to match my copies of the first two).

5. Angels in America by Tony Kushner.
The plot of this play is very hard to summarise: When I told my dad about it, I only managed to cover the subplot about Prior Walter. Indeed, much of the plot could be accurately be described as "gay guys talking about politics." Surprisingly, despite all of this, it manages to work as the most epic work written for the stage since Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung. Why? You'll just have to read it, or, possibly, watch the HBO miniseries based on the play, to find out.

4. The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman.
I discovered this book based to TVTropes due to its being categorised as a "weird american thing." In essence, this book is an almanac of completely made-up facts (in fact, many of the facts given are half-true). Considering the complete insanity of many of the facts (things like otters being called lobsters and being driven to extinction by new lobsters, or an escalating war of strange precipitation between Milwaukee and Richmond, VA) makes one wonder about the kind of world in which it is true. This is, once again, the first in a projected trilogy, and only the first two published yet. I have just started to read the second book, and it's actually a worthy successor to the original.

3. Autobiography of Malcolm X.
Due to the intricacies of my reading queue, I waited a while to start to read this book, but when I actually managed to get into reading this book, I was surprised by the conversational style of this book. The tone of the book seemed almost exactly like I was having a conversation with the man himself, and it really felt like what you'd expect when you talked with an orator. And I even managed to gain more insight into the beliefs of the nation of Islam, and even the bizarre nature of the genetics that the story of Yakub and the creation of the other races (other than Black). The afterword by the ghostwriter Alex Haley even gave more insight into the man's life and the book's creation.

2. The Ice Man by Philip Carlo.
For a while, I was on a big kick of reading books about hitmen, in the hopes that I could create a hitman story of my own. It didn't work out. Along with the two books written by Joey Black (an actual hitman), this work formed the non-fiction part of my research (I really wished I could find more non-fiction books focusing on the lives of hitmen, but there you go.) This book is about a man named Richard Kuklinski who claimed to have killed over 300 people and worked for all of New York's five families (since he wasn't Italian, he couldn't "get made" into any one family). The fact is, that, despite many questions that have been raised about the veracity of many of Kuklinski's claims, it's actually a very compelling story, and even on this level, it's still a must-read. Surprisingly, despite the fact that this is the story of a career killer who talked about killing people with no discernible emotion, this actually contains one of the most touching scenes I've ever read: while meeting his second wife's family, they take him to a Thanksgiving dinner, and Richard, for the first time, manages to discover for the first time, the phenomenon of being loved unconditionally by a family (his own was abusive, and his father even killed his own son Florian.) Naturally, this shift in tone does not last long.

1. Requiem For a Dream by Hubert Selby Jr.
Yes, Hubert Selby is one of my favourite authors, and I read his four major novels, and, apart from Last Exit to Brooklyn, this is probably his best known novel. It's also one of the most disturbing novels ever written (but surprisingly, not even the most disturbing one written by Selby, that honour going to The Room), and, especially in this book, the bizarre nature of his typography (ridiculously huge indentations for paragraphs and replacing apostrophes with slash marks) enhances the disturbing mood created by his books by disorienting his reader, so that, if the acts being described don't disturb the reader, the confusion will ensure that his novel has a profound effect on the reader. The movie only concentrates the 300-page novel into a 100-minute film, and very effectively, I may add.

Film Idea of the Day: The keyboardist for a band ends up falling in love with an angel. This love forces him and his bandmates into a battle between them and the forces of the Almighty. The plot is, in essence Scott Pilgrim meets His Dark Materials, and should ideally include satire that covers everything from religion to the Twilight saga to eagle feather law.

Film Review of the Day: Black Swan. Like the film version of Requiem for a Dream, this was directed by Darren Aronofsky. Although I haven't been keeping abreast of his career since Requiem, it did seem like a big stylistic leap between the editing-driven, visceral Requiem and the surreal horror of Black Swan. That said, he did apparently release two films between Requiem and Black Swan, but I haven't seen them. Despite not being what I would have expected from the man who made Requiem for a Dream, and the subject matter (Ballet) not being something I'm particularly interested in, it was quite good. It really helps that there was a scene in which the two main dancers have sex with each other. Hot girl on girl action does tend to improve a movie, at least in my estimation.

Quote of the Day: "When a prosecutor loses a case, do you think he's happy that an innocent man walks free? No, they're angry that they've lost a chance at the governor's mansion."
_____________Hubert Selby Jr., The Room (actually a paraphrase of something in that book. If I were able to find the correct words, I would have posted them.) Food for thought for anybody who watches Nancy Grace regularly.

Link of the Day: My Film Teacher's Blog.

Tract Reviews: Uninvited. Jack Chick returns to the subject of AIDS, and makes claims that should be obviously false to anybody who has studied AIDS since the name was adopted in 1983. There are facts that should be obvious to anybody with two brain cells to rub together that Jack ignores. Here are some of them, for the benefit of anybody who doesn't want to read this tract.

*AIDS is no longer quite the Death Sentence it once was. If identified early enough, it can be kept in control with anti-retroviral drugs. I could just be talking about being HIV positive, though.
*If a six-year-old girl gets raped and left for dead, shouldn't she have had more extreme problems to worry about than possibly becoming a lesbian? Even disregarding physical problems, shouldn't she be scared that it could have happened again, thus ruining her trust for other people for at least several decades?
*Come to think of it, while it would be an oversimplification to state that homosexuality is wholly genetic, there's very significant evidence of genetic influence in sexual orientation. And it certainly does not come about just because they got molested as kids.
*AIDS does not just happen to gay people. In fact, there's also a significant amount of people who got it from heterosexual contact.

I really wish I didn't have to say these facts, but apparently, I do.

Shout out: Another guy has started to follow the blog, his name is life.experienced.

Issue 186

News/Film Review: Film Class and Earth.
Throughout the previous semester, I had one particularly interesting class: Intro to Film. In essence, Wednesdays would be spent setting up a particular movement, and almost without exception, I would be supplementing his information, and I would sit next to some guy whose enthusiasm was matched only by his utter lack of knowledge of the medium's history pre-Karate Kid. Fridays would be spent discussing the film in more detail. By the end of the class, we had to rank each film we saw on a scale of 0-10. All but one film ended up watched ended up with a score above 6.0. The one that didn't was Alexander Dovzhenko's Earth. There's several reasons for this, and I will divide the reasons into innate and environmental problems.
Environmental problems:
*There were only two films we ended up watching on Friday. Since Friday classes and the film were approximately the same length, there wasn't much of a discussion.
*The room was designed differently, and thus, the likelihood that somebody's heads were covering up the subtitles (and the film was a silent, no less) was much higher.
*Seriously, subtitles in a film where the dialogue is communicated through intertitles? If Kino can try to replicate the stylised intertitles of Metropolis, they can at least translate the nondescript ones used in Earth.
*The DVD's print was taken from 1971. The film was heavily reliant on visuals, so, in essence, Kino, who released the film on R1 DVD screwed up. Amazingly, a British Distributor (Mr. Bongo) has managed to put out a version on DVD that looked much better. That said, I haven't seen that version, but at least I'd not be able to ask "What the hell am I looking at?" as often as I was. I shouldn't have to question whether I'm looking at a wheat field or not.

Innate Problems:
*Soviet Montage is a hard movement to find an accessible entry point for; of the three major features, Battleship Potemkin gets dull at points, Man With the Movie Camera hasn't much of a plot, and Earth is... well... Earth.
*Its pacing is bizarre. The opening scene is very slowly paced, consisting of two title cards, shots of a man slowly dying (presumably to symbolise the death of the Tsarist way of life), and shots of what I can only assume to be fields. By the end, there are no less than five scenes being intercut, and while some of them make sense (particularly the one of the priest trying in vain to get God to stop a non-church-based funeral), some of them are completely nonsensical (like a man putting his head to a sand dune and running about in a circle). The juxtaposition makes no sense, and I even said as such when I had to write a report. Apparently, it was supposed to spur people into action.
*The plot is almost impossible to follow. I had to look up several plot summaries of the film before I had to figure out what was supposed to be going on (apparently the man running about in a circle was in guilt over murdering his brother. I suppose Raskolnikov only got off as long as he did because Porfiry never saw him doing that), and sometimes what I was supposed to be looking at. Once again, if I have to look up summaries to be able to recognise a wheat field, something is very, very wrong.

Here's hoping that I can get back to doing two posts a month.

Also, according to my Dashboard, I apparently have a follower: Enrrique (apparently he has two r's in his name) Perez. If his profile is correct, he is apparently from Duarte in the Dominican Republic. According to the one post he's made that I had to translate with Babelfish because I don't speak Spanish, He apparently thinks all politicians are equally bad, and with the last two years in mind, I can't say I blame him. Here's hoping we can actually come into some sort of contact (preferrably in English)

Links: Because every Soviet film made before a certain date is in the Public Domain, here is a copy of the film on Youtube.

Issue 183

News/Review: In Defense of The Searchers.
Recently, I was browsing TVTropes when I stumbled upon a page for reviews of John Ford's classic "The Searchers." The only review of it was negative, but there were just too many wrong points in that review for me to accept it. The first paragraph focuses on the portrayal of the Comanche nation. After making a good point about how their sole motivation for taking Debbie seemed to be to rape some white women, he made a mention about how he didn't like that they were so incompetent after that incident. It should be noted that at that point in the Indian wars when the film was set, the Comanches were clearly losing, and most of them had already been sent to reservations. And besides, they kept a woman captive for five years; they clearly had to have been doing something right. He goes on to complain some more about the portrayal of the Indians (I really have to ask: was he really expecting something like Dances with Wolves in 1956? It was certainly a fair portrayal for its day)even though, the fact is, that John Ford makes it perfectly clear that their actions are driven by a general hatred of the white man because, well, they tended to be no more likable than John Wayne's character Ethan Edwards was. Which brings him to the next point; he seems to think that Ethan is like every other character John Wayne played. Funny, I don't remember Tom Doniphon trying to desecrate Liberty Valance's corpse on the off-chance that it would hurt him in the afterlife, and I don't remember Sean Thornton giving Will Danaher rabbit-punches during their famous Donnybrook in the same way that Ethan shoots at retreating enemies in this film. And while the "Look" subplot definitely hasn't aged very well, it is certainly an oversimplification to compare Martin to Tonto, especially since, while Tonto was effectively the Lone Ranger's loyal slave, MArtin has several moments where he calls out Ethan on his behavior (like when he tries to kill Debbie, who has gone native.) The reviewer seems to miss the depth of the characters, apparently seeing the main conflict of the film as being Ethan vs. Comanches, and missing the point that, clearly, there are unlikable people on every side of a conflict, and Ethan and Scar both fit the bill for their societies very well. However, he seems to have not noticed that the conflict that is given more screen time is clearly the conflict between Martin and Ethan, with Martin acting as Humphrey van Weyden to Ethan's Wolf Larsen. The fact is, that this film is not even really about the rescue of a woman from the Indians. It is, in essence, a film about how revenge shapes the nature of our minds.

Issue 178

News: Cinema on Criterion: Crack is Cheaper.
In the past twelve months, I've managed to get my hands on a few Criterion DVDs that had just gone out of print. Most recently, five films from one of my favorite directors, Luis Bunuel, had just gotten out of circulation, and I managed to get two of them: The Milky Way and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. So far, this just leaves Belle de Jour as the only one of his later French works to remain in circulation. Just before that, I managed to get Ran, The Third Man, Grand Illusion, Tales of Hoffman, and Pierrot Le Fou while I could. Surpsisingly, a lot of this has been happening extremely recently: I managed to come across a list of OOP Criterion titles from October 2009, and there were only 24 titles on the list. With the latest two extinction events, as I call them, the total has become 59. Yes, suddenly, Criterion seems to be hemorrhaging titles, and who pays for it? The fans who were hoping for the right time to get the titles they wanted and give the copy they kept renting from the local video rental to somebody else for a change. And the fact that most, if not all, of these titles will be extremely expensive ($30 a pop) doesn't help. The thing that I think is a big middle finger to the cinephiles who would want to acquire them is that, while for most of the titles I mentioned, it appears that there are no plans to put them back on the market anytime soon, some of the titles are available, but only on Studiocanal Blu-Ray. I can certainly imagine that many of the titles would look good on Blu-ray, especially the scenery porn that is Ran, but the fact is that just because somebody is willing to pay upwards $30 for a single-disc DVD that may or may not have had any special features doesn't mean that they're going to be receptive to having to buy a whole new system just to be able to buy a new title. I personally am considering holding back on Blu-ray until I can buy a portable player at Costco so I can watch them on vacation. And it's not just art-house distributors who are doing this, by the way. Just to list one example, according to Amazon, Kevin Smith's Dogma is only available on Blu-ray now. Why? DVD is still going strong; making certain titles only available on Blu-Ray is not going to change that. It's just going to piss off the people who still prefer DVD.

Film Review: Bugsy Malone. I recently stumbled upon this movie, a gangster movie with only preteens in the cast, at Skokie Public Library, and I found that, while utterly bizarre (twelve-year old Jodie Foster in such a sexualized performance is unsettling even if you remember her as a child prostitute in Taxi Driver), many of the songs in the film are earworms; Even right now, I can hear the words "we're the very best at being bad" being sung in my head. It's certainly worth a look, but it's not available on DVD, only VHS. This problem really needs a once-over.

Quote of the Day: "The inquisitors were torturing Harry. First, Ignatius used the rock. Then Billy asked Harry if he wanted to read his BDSM blog. Harry was so surprised that his pants flew right off. He was wearing women's underpants. The inquisitors were wearing them, too. They realized that they were all men of the lord."

Link of the Day: A new reading of Thirty H's: The greatest Harry Potter Fanfic ever.

Tract Reviews: The Poor Revolutionist: I can only assume that this tract was re-released to capitalize on right-wing fears that Obama=Black Revolutionary Antichrist, and not Obama=milquetoast who can't even get Universal Health Care to pass yet. None of this stops the tract from feeling hopelessly dated.

Things to Come: Apparently, a Gypsy Catholic fortune teller decides to tell a Fundie what for, after she learns he can tell the future, but, surprise surprise, gets interested in getting saved, but in an unusual Gainax ending, the rapture occurs, and we're left hanging. Also features first person narration. Besides, everybody knows that only one man could see the future and his name was Oswald Spengler.

Issue 177

News: An Alternate View of Aldo Raine.
As I mentioned earlier, I have become increasingly immersed in the life of this autistic manchild by the name of Christian W. Chandler and his crappy webcomic. By this point, I am less horrified by what I see than I was. What I didn't mention was that he claims to be part Native-American, noting that, especially in the south, where he is from, having Native ancestry was often cover for having Black ancestry (apparently the one-drop rule didn't apply to the native folk.) This immediately got me to thinking about somebody from a movie I had seen a year ago who claimed to be of Native American ancestry, Aldo Raine from Inglorious Basterds. In addition, he has a scar on his neck that is supposed to be rope burn (this is not so easy to see in the film itself, but it is much easier to see in publicity shoots and the cover of the one-disc edition,) and the published script implies that Raine was the survivor of a lynching. So my theory is that the people in his hometown of Maynardville, TN, discovered he was partially black, and attempted to lynch him for a crime he (considering his brutality in the film) might have actually committed, but by some freak accident, survived, and turned his anger towards the bigotry of his region, and after it became clear that the American Army was going to fight them, their international equivalents, The Nazis. And, as soon as he realized that the Army would be less unkind towards both being mixed-race and the sociopathic behavior Raine clearly harbored, he fit in like a glove, and he rose through the ranks. And knowing Quentin Tarantino, I'm fairly certain that Fritz Lang's anti-lynching film Fury somehow fits in, but I don't know where.

Film Idea of the Day: N/A.

Film Review of the Day: My Sister's Keeper. I managed to get this movie recently, and I have to say that the idea is certainly an interesting one, and, indeed, seems somewhat Randian in its plot: a child is born pretty much as spare parts for her leukemic sister, and eventually has enough and files for medical emancipation, seeming to recall the interesting things of Ayn Rand's novels, namely the triumph of the individual over the demands of altruism, without the romantic plot tumors or fighting collectivism from a collective. What I really liked about the film was its ending, and especially how different it turned out to be from its original novel. In both, the well sister got medical emancipation, but in the original novel, according to TVTropes, she immediately got killed by a bus and had her kidneys donated anyway. However, in the film, it turned out that the sick sister actually masterminded the plan for the well sister to apply for emancipation to let her mother finally know she had had enough and wanted an end to all the suffering, and so, it turns out that both sisters get the suffering to stop on both ends, and even their hard-ass of a mother ends up lightening up in the end, as seen as when they go to Montana. Unfortunately, a lot of the movie, particularly the parts which didn't have to do with the major plot (read: the flashbacks) I just couldn't relate to.

Quote of the Day: "Your definition is narrow; life insisting on life’s viewpoint, when alternatives exist."
______________Dr. Manhattan on the point of view of the mother in My Sister's Keeeper.

Link of the Day: A song I think should have ended the movie, and could have even lightened the mood, and would still be fitting.

Issue 176

News: Why I'm unsure that my Alan Mencken project will ever get off the ground.
For a while, I've been conceptualizing an idea for an album of covers of songs composed by Oscar-Winning Composer Alan Mencken, many of which will be changed from being relatively faithful re-imaginings of the songs to completely off-the-wall versions.
Some of the ideas I've been thinking about for this one:
*Somewhere That's Green: Very similar to the original, only piano and vocals, but the vocals are done like Tom Waits, with very little lyrical change. "I look like Donna Reed" indeed!
*Part of Your World: Ideally, the first verse would be done as a mambo, but the rest of the song would be done as a punk number in line with Sid Vicious' "My Way."
*Under The Sea: Style Parody of the Steve Miller Band, particularly "Fly Like an Eagle."
*Kiss the Girl: Done as Astral Weeks-era Van Morrison.
*Beauty and the Beast: Power Ballad in the style of Sister Christian, with similar slide guitar work to Badfinger's Day After Day.
*Medley: One Jump Ahead/Friend Like Me/Prince Ali. Done as a single medley in the style of Django Reinhardt's Quintet of the Hot Club of France, with solos on guitar and violin (which may or may not be synthesised), and possibly some extremely low-key vocals.
*A Whole New World: Done in Two Versions, Three if you count the intentional false start in one version: Version A begins simply, with the first line sung, punctuated with a single, extremely deep and dense piano chord which lasts for upwards of a minute. The song resumes as a style parody of The Moody Blues' "Ride My Seesaw," complete with synthetic three-part harmonies, for both male and female singers. Version B is done as a solo number only accompanied by violin, and possibly a whip (which once again, may or may not be synthesised.)
*Colors of the Wind: Part 1 is a style parody of Rod Stewart's Rhythm of my Heart, before I manage to hijack the song half-way through, turning it into a doo-wop number, and adding an entire instrumental break, which includes me arguing with the female singer about my interruption, before finally working on collaborating in the end.
*Savages: A style parody of two early-twentieth-century mental patients, one singing after getting into the doctor's supply of Amyl Nitrites, and the other playing pianos while in the first stages of neurosyphillis, or whatever the hell brought Nietzsche to his complete mental collapse.
*Heaven's Light/Hellfire-Done as a duet, Heaven's Light done as a Jimmy Webb song, but Hellfire done as a number from Sweeney Todd, naturally, pared down to the essentials for both cases, climaxing in Sweeney Todd's work whistle.
*True Love's Kiss: Well, Hurra Torpedo is probably the best way to go for this song.
*That's How You Know: Instead of the calypso beat of the original song, it would be done as a style parody of Led Zeppelin's "Fool in the Rain."

As you can imagine, this would definitely need to be more than just one man and his guitar. However, I'm not sure whether such a thing could get off the ground. Here's the sort of thing I'm looking for in the band members:
*Female Singer: Her voice should be pretty far-removed from the sort of Broadway feel that seems to pervade through many of Mencken's songs, and ideally, it should be somewhat like Kim Deal from the Pixies, or any other female singer to alt-rock bands who are mainly remembered because Kurt Cobain idolized them. She may or may not play any of the other four instruments below.
*Keyboardist: My plan is that the Keyboardist should be the skeleton key to making the band truly work, and to help realize the goals. Ideally, he (any he's used from here on in are gender-neutral) would have as varied musical tastes as me, and as you might have guessed, my tastes are extremely eclectic [In my music queue right now are Pierre Boulez, Tenacious D, The Byrds, Hot Rats, Van Halen (not Van Hagar), and Miles Davis' Bitches Brew.]
*Bassist: Should be able to play both bass guitar and upright bass (for songs with styles that wouldn't work on bass guitar, like the Django Reinhardt medley)
*Lead Guitarist/Drummer: No special requirements here, although, if possible, for the Django Reinhardt medley, should be competent enough on guitar to keep up the rhythm (along with me, as Django Reinhardt did have two rhythm guitarists.)
And to have these sort of musicians play mainly radically changed versions of Disney Songs? You see why I'm not sure about the future of the project.

Movie Review: Bruno. I finally managed to get my hands on a copy of the final movie in the Sascha Baron Cohen trilogy recently, and let me tell you, it may not be as funny as Borat was, but it certainly has its moments, including a Missed Moment of Awesome where Bruno meets the "God Hates Fags" gang and simply does nothing but walk past them onto a bus. It was while he was in leather, huddled and handcuffed onto another guy, but still. In fact, some of the best scenes, as the DVD release showed, ended up on the cutting room floor, including an interview with a Neo-Nazi leader. However, the material is almost all fresh, with very little reworking of past antics, as far as I remember, from the Ali G Show. Even where both the series and film have a gay converter, Bruno doesn't ask the same questions for both interviews. And yes, the Hitler references get old pretty fast, but there is a talking penis in the movie, but it is only on for a brief moment, shouting "Bruno!" and even then, only as computer-generated bumper for a prospective Bruno television series.

Idea of the Day: It's somewhat like Sex in the City, except aimed heavily towards men, and often seeming like In the Company of Men: The Series, including a short story writer obsessed with Charles Bukowski, a dirty cop who can, if the occasion strikes, be as much of a monster as Mr. Blonde from Reservoir Dogs, a businessman who moonlights as a blues guitarist and is the token nice guy of the group, and a cold, rational, neurosurgeon.

Issue 175

News: How not to do a Jesus biopic: Another long-term essay.
A few weeks ago, I saw the movie, The Passion of the Christ. My mother heard about it, and she said that she never wanted to see it (and she's the most religious member of my immediate family, although for her, it means self-identifying as Lutheran, and occasionally going to Church on Christmas or Easter, depending on her health), especially since she heard that it was little more than a glorified snuff film. Well, I ended up renting it from the library, and, it turns out, she was right. The fact is that it was almost entirely devoted to the torture and execution of Jesus, with surprisingly little focus on any other aspect of his life. And, even though they went through the trouble of translating the script into the languages that would have actually been spoken at the time, they even manage to get that wrong, especially since the Roman soldiers were speaking in ECCLESIASTICAL LATIN. Honestly, if you're going to translate your dialogue into a foreign, dead, language, make sure it's the right one. I like a bit of the old ultraviolence now and again, but really, when the entire point of the movie is devoted to one man's execution, it is not good. Even Funny Games took time out of showing the two men torturing the Yuppie family to break the fourth wall and play Naked City music. To keep the contrast to other religious movies, The Passion of Joan of Arc devoted itself to the last few hours of the life of a saint, but C.T. Dreyer focused the movie not only on the suffering itself, but also at least gave Joan some character development. However, Mel Gibson gives his Jesus very little room for such character development, and gives us no real reason to care about his suffering except that we're supposed to care about Jesus being crucified. Indeed, I think there can be, and actually have been, some great interpretations of Jesus' life on film, like Pasolini's Gospel According to Matthew (although a lot of my admiration can be due to its eclectic sountrack), Nicholas Ray's King of Kings, or, in terms of sheer comprehensiveness, Zefferelli's Jesus of Nazareth. I'd even recommend Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ, even if its casting choices are suspect, to say the least, and it isn't even based on the Gospels. While we're on adaptations of the Bible done by unusual people, I recently read R. Crumb's adaptation of the Book of Genesis, and, as it turns out, the man who created Mr. Natural and wrote the source material for the first X-rated cartoon film actually does a pretty good job of adapting the first book of the Bible. He even manages to make the "begats" interesting by actually giving the people being "begotten" a face, and it's actually surprisingly reverent for R. Crumb, and quite possibly the most oddly reverent adaptation of the Bible since Aphrodite's Child's rock opera of Revelation: "666."

Relevant Quote: "The New Testament tells two stories for two different sorts of readers. One is the old story of the achievement of our salvation by the sacrifice and atonement of a divine personage who was barbarously slain and rose again on the third day: the story as it was accepted by the apostles. And in this story the political, economic, and moral views of the Christ have no importance: the atonement is everything; and we are saved by our faith in it, and not by works or opinions (other than that particular opinion) bearing on practical affairs.

The other is the story of a prophet who, after expressing several very interesting opinions as to practical conduct, both personal and political, which are now of pressing importance, and instructing his disciples to carry them out in their daily life, lost his head; believed himself to be a crude legendary form of god; and under that delusion courted and suffered a cruel execution in the belief that he would rise from the dead and come in glory to reign over a regenerated world. In this form, the political, economic and moral opinions of Jesus, as guides to conduct, are interesting and important: the rest is mere psychopathy and superstition."
_______________________George Bernard Shaw, Preface to Androcles and the Lion.

Tract Reviews: The Little Sneak: a kid hides his parents' life savings and a preacher coerces him to giving up the money's location. For his trouble he is killed.
Is Allah Like You: A muslim father reads the Quran and finds out how much of an A-hole Allah is, and converts to Christianity. Jack is completely oblivious that many of these criticisms he makes of Islam can be made of Christianity, and can even be given scriptural citations.

Issue 167

News: The Vaulting of Classic Movies Has Left me In Despair!
(Important Note: I came up with the title long before I lost control of my laptop [Something which has left me in despair], basing it on a series called Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei.)
Of all the classes I took at Oakton, my least favorite one was my section of Contemporary Culture and the Arts. Between the obtuse texts and disturbing photographs, it was one of the most depressing classes I'd taken. One of the few rays of light that came in the class was a showing of Chaplin's City Lights to ease our way from photography to the City, but that silver lining had a touch of grey when I realized that A) Despite acquiring the first volume of the Chaplin Collection, I never acquired the second volume which included City Lights, among other films, B) It was out of Print, and C) It was virtually unobtainable. After a failed attempt to order the movie online in November from a retailer that didn't even have it, I eventually resorted to eBay, and with my parents' help, I got it. As it turned out, virtually all of Chaplin's copyrighted films were out of print. The sole exception was 1967's Countess from Hong Kong. The realization of this shocked me. I mean, Chaplin was one of the greatest filmmakers of all time; why put his works out of print? I mean, imagine if all of Alfred Hitchcock's copyrighted films were unobtainable except for Torn Curtain. For that matter, imagine if Torn Curtain was the only Julie Andrews movie that was obtainable. I later managed to get a hold of the Third Man when I learned that it had gone out of print, and managed to buy it before I had to resort to eBay. And this is, in my opinion worse than what Walt Disney has been doing for years with the "Disney Vault." After all, with the Disney Vault, there is a known schedule; you can expect that a few years after the movie gets out of print, there will be a new, improved edition. And for that matter, at least Disney puts the movies in a rotation, as opposed to just taking them all out of print at once.

Film Review of the Day: The Kid, The Gold Rush, City Lights, Modern Times, The Great Dictator, and Limelight. - Really, all you need to do is to watch one of these movies to make you reaize that it is practically a crime to put all of these movies out of print.
The Circus- I haven't seen this one yet.
Monsieur Verdoux- Many other directors would kill to make a movie like Monsieur Verdoux. It really says a lot that this movie isn't even in this director's top five.
A Woman of Paris- I haven't seen this one yet, either, but from what I've heard, especially due to its sheer Out-of-place nature in Chaplin's oevure.
A King in New York- It's okay. Certainly not a masterpiece like many other movies Chaplin's made, but it is actually pretty funny. In fact, just because of the fact that it includes a scene in which we see Chaplin go to the movies and watching some previews, and one of these movies is Glen or Glenda. That's right; one of the greatest cinematic minds in history and one of the worst directors of all time meet. I can only imagine what would have happened if he had heard about Coleman Francis.
The Chaplin Revue- Well, it is a compilation of three of his last short movies with his narration and score, but at least those three shorts are among his best.

Quote of the Day: Wars, conflict - it's all business. One murder makes a villain; millions, a hero. Numbers sanctify, my good fellow!
__________Charlie Chaplin, in and as Monsieur Verdoux.

Link of the Day: Have you ever wondered what you really believed about the world? Here you can figure it out, somewhat.

Issue 156

News: FREE ROMAN POLANSKI!
Well, yesterday, they finally did it. They finally had Oscar-Winning film director Roman Polanski arrested. In case none of you know what I'm talking about, I'm talking about an incident 30 years ago where he photographed a minor nude, and then had sex with her. After an arrest and plea bargain, he headed for France, where he has been based ever since. The girl has since agreed that the charges should be dropped, but thus far, attempts to overturn the conviction have been unsuccessful, especially in light of Polanski's arrest. Here's what I say: Let it go. The incident was thirty years old, and everybody involved seems to have moved on except for those people who were ultimately responsible for the arrest. Roman has suffered enough: he lived through the Holocaust, with his mother dying in the chambers of Auschwitz, his travel options have been limited for the last few decades as a result of living in fear, and now this. And as many of his acquaintances have said, it's not like he's going to do it again; and, as I see it, he probably wouldn't have done it once if he had been truly aware of the fact that minority ends much later here than it does in Europe. Hell, if California can let a footballer and mediocre actor get away with murder, or can let Hmong gangs get away with a more heinous variation on a very similar theme on the basis of culture [to wit, like Borat/Pam, but less funny], why not let a man who has just happened to be one of the big cinematic minds of the last century free? Incidentally, it appears that the foreign ministers of Poland and France (two countries that count Roman as a citizen) are doing everything in their power to grant Roman clemency, and the minister of Poland is considering petitioning Barack Obama himself for clemency. Well, if Obama is reading this, and I freely admit that the possibility is very slight, I must admit that I have been underwhelmed by his performance, doing comparatively little to undo the damages of Bush, as many want him to do,(admitting that he is, of course, not doing everything in his power to be like Bush, like McCain would likely have done), and if he really wants my support, even if he fails to do anything better, like get universal health care, undo the Patriot Act, actually get us out of Iraq (he has a timeline, but it remains to be seen whether he'll stick to it), or anything like this, he should at least set Roman free. In fact, I feel so strongly about this, I swear that if Roman's arrest has any effect on the release of his film project "The Ghost," I will vote third party in 2012, no matter if it means that Dick Cheney will sit in the White House.

Band Name of the Day: none.

Film Idea of the Day: An increasingly unstable hardboiled crime writer ends up embroiled in a bizarre plot, while writing a novel with a bizarre plot of its own (with twin clones of Hitler).

Review of the Day: Well, since I've found no new films truly worth the time it takes to review them in the past week, I'm going to review a book I read and loved (at least somewhat) recently; Anton LaVey's Satanic Bible. My thoughts on the book, simply: if you've read and enjoyed Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Nietzsche's Works, and Ayn Rand's novels, I have to admit that this book, or at least the first two sections/100 pages, are the next logical step. Personally, I think that the addition of "magical rituals" tends to detract somewhat from the book's philosophy, but nevertheless, it is still interesting to read. While much has been said of LaVey's admiration of Nietzsche, and he is alleged to have said that Satanism is, in essence "Ayn Rand with rituals" (three of which are described, and none of which, for the record, involve blood sacrifice), I think it is necessary to note that this work seems to owe a significant debt, possibly second-hand, to William Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The biggest similarities I've noticed are in the styles, especially apparent in comparison between Blake's Proverbs of Hell and LaVey's Book of Satan. In addition, the admiration of the Bible present in many of Blake's prophetic works is much less present in his Marriage, while the criticism of the institution of the Church is far more emphasized in the same work. By eschewing both, it appears that LaVey is taking the next logical step. In addition, LaVey's association of Lucifer with enlightenment should be seen in comparison with Blake's association of Hell with energy and eternal delight.

Quote of the Day: "And the County Judge/Who Held A Grudge/Will Search forevermore/ For the Band on the Run"
__________Paul McCartney.

Link: None this week.

Issue 154

Intro: Well, I'm not going to put this entry in the standard form. I will, however, build most of my standard sections into one large section for this one. Links will most likely return for the next entry.

Actual Entry: The Brothers Karamazov: Book vs. Movie.
Recently, I re-read Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (in the "new" Pevear/Volokhonsky translation) and I must admit that in this re-reading, I actually got more out of it. I'm not sure whether it was the new translation (previously, I had read Garnett's long-maligned [for good reason] translation), or the intervening years between reads, but as it turned out, I actually got more out of it even than when I had read books 5 and 6 for my Honors Seminar last semester. Now, I actually understood Vonnegut's character Eliot Rosenwater when he said that it contained "everything there was to know about life," especially from its frequent arguing about opposing points of view, from Ivan and Aloysha arguing about whether a God (or at least one worth worshipping) exists, to whether or not Dmitri is innocent. From what I remembered, P and V had emphasized this more than Garnett did (she seemed mainly interested in making Russian literature accessible to the proles by making virtually all of Russian prose read like Dickens.) Later, I would eventually learn that there was a Hollywood version of the book available on Youtube (starring, of all people, Yul Brynner [who has by now become my mental image of Dmitri Karamazov] and William Shatner.) As I clicked the Youtube link, I asked myself a question: How could they possibly cram a 776-page novel into a 145-minute film? Well, the short answer is, by basically stripping away the philosophy and reducing it to a murder mystery (in the process taking away virtually all of the ambiguity as to Dmitri's innocence or guilt). Of course, the narrator himself, who in the novel, almost becomes a character on himself, while never interfering with the action, only with the audience's perception of it, does not appear. Of course, I would not expect that this aspect of the novel to appear in the film. But what really bugged me was that surprisingly, most of Ivan's scenes (particularly his expounding of evil and the Grand Inquisitor "poem" in Book 5, and his vision of Satan in book 11) have been cut, although, oddly, he seems to refer to the latter in the courtroom scene, of course, perhaps the content of the former scenes, in addition to lengthening the film, would have angered the Hays office [In addition to their prohibitions against sex, they also banned criticism of religion, and Ivan's well-spoken defense of rationalism would certainly qualify] and thus there was no way to include them, thus watering Ivan down to the point where he seems to be little more than a walk-on character and not one of the most compelling characters in Russian literature. Father Zosima, on the other hand, hardly even appears at all. To be fair, the scenes of his autobiography (Book 6) would likely have broken the flow of any film, but his other scenes, particularly his death rites and the smell (addressed in Book 7), would likely be a welcome addition. But for the real thing that bugged me, look no further than the opening shots. To paraphrase Austin Powers, "You know what's remarkable? Is how much Pushkin-era Russia looks in no way like virtually any Old western Town." Indeed, the only real things that made it look any different from any old western town were a few onion bulbs on the old church buildings and a few token signs in Cyrillic. I remember reading that back in the 1930s (I think the article was dated 1936), movies could be filmed that took place anywhere in the world could be filmed without even leaving California. It looks like the filmmakers took that sensibility and ran with it, but unlike a lot of movies, it really shows. Going back to Pushkin, one thing that I didn't expect to be carried over into the film was Fyodor Karamazov's apparent foot fetish; in the original novel, he himself tells Dmitri, "Don't be afraid of the barefoot ones, don't despise them, they're pearls," {in addition, Pushkin's apparent fondness for "little feet" is mentioned several times, something which is especially pronounced in Eugene Onegin, Chapter 1, stanzas 30-4} and in the film, is introduced writing on the foot of a girl he had tied to his bed. Takes all sorts, I suppose. With all of this, it should go without saying that it is unlikely that a satisfactory film version of the novel would ever come about, certainly not in anything under three hours, although there is a four-hour film version from Russia made ten years after the Hollywood version, which is likely to be closer to definitive, and according to IMDB, there was recently (like earlier this summer) a miniseries version (roughly 7 1/2 hours). Of course, none of these versions are in print on DVD. Judging from the quality of this version, perhaps this is a Good thing. But perhaps an English miniseries version might be able to do the movie justice, or maybe not.

Issue 152

Here's something I wrote during my Door County vacation.

News/Film Review: Watching the Watchmen Director's Cut.

Every so often, a work appears so great that it can only be described as perfect. Such works include Mozart's Don Giovanni, Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, and Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. One work which comes close is Alan Moore's graphic novel Watchmen. When I reviewed the movie, I loved it, but had to concede that it really removed too many things. Curiously, a lot of the little things I liked in the original were removed, foremost of which was the scene wherein Rorschach describes his connection between the Kitty Genovese case and his “face,” a scene which, while explaining why Kovacs turned to vigilantism, also explains how the blotch on his mask can move. I think it would be very little of an overstatement to say that if that scene were included, I would readily call it my favorite film of all time. Of course, most of those little things I liked that were excluded weren't reinstated in the director's cut, probably for the better. After all, why have a scene where Dr. Manhattan sends all of the rioters during the police strike to their homes when the other scene during the police strike gives much more insight to the Comedian's character and the other scene in which he sends everybody around him home is a major plot point? Well, anyway, as in the original, Malin Ackerman underacts, and Billy Crudup overacts. So what's expanded upon in this cut? Two changes that were particularly welcome were that Rorschach's interviews with Malcolm Long were expanded upon (this was one of my biggest problems with the theatrical cut. I estimated that the entire events of issue 6 were condensed into 3 ½ minutes), and the biggest advertised change is the inclusion of the subplot about the death of Hollis Mason. In the theatrical cut, he appears as Dreiberg's mentor, and disappears halfway into the movie without a trace, but however, in this cut, we actually see his death scene. All I can say is that the actual scene of his death, well, reminds me a lot of Beowulf's last battle with the dragon [not Grendel, not Grendel's mother, the dragon in the last part], although, of course, he is not victorious in the end. And now there's another edition of the film in the works. Around December, there will be a five-disc edition of the film with Tales of the Black Freighter reinstated into the film [in the director's cut, all that exists of the story is a page of the comic being read by some guy before the gang meets up to kill Hollis], bringing the running time to 3 ½ hours. Although I'm unsure as to whether there will be much else added, except maybe the long-advertised “two Bernies scene”, but at least one new special feature is planned that wasn't in the Director's Cut DVD; Commentary with Zack Snyder and Dave Gibbons. These are the major reasons for getting this edition of the DVD, but there is one big reason against it: two of the five discs are the Watchmen Motion Comics that I bought months ago. Maybe if there was a 3-Disc edition with the full cut and all the special features without the Motion Comic, I'd buy it. Point is: I highly recommend the Director's Cut of Watchmen.

Band Name of the Day: None this Week.

Film Idea of the Day: I read The Yosemite Murders, and after reading it, it seems that, of all of the serial killers I've read about, Cary Stayner's story is probably the one which seems to be the most doable in film form. Of course, perhaps the way I'd do it would probably be a more art-house way than the made-for-tv film story accorded to his brother Steven. Perhaps I may not even use real names.

Quote of the Day: “Schoolchildren are merciless people: separately they're god's angels, but together, especially in school, they're quite often merciless.”

____________________Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Issue 149

News: Quite possibly the most bizarre tribute album ever conceived...
Recently, I bought a copy of a tribute album to the Carpenters (If I were a Carpenter) by various alt-rock artists (incidentally, this is not the album alluded to in the title). Think about it; several bands made up of jaded youths covering a band who, in their salad days, not only didn't drink or do drugs, but didn't even move out of their parents' house. Listening to the album again, I eventually ended up thinking about another artist who deserves a similar tribute album where the famous songs are divorced from their traditional style; I am talking about Disney songwriter Alan Mencken. Of course, if the album is ever made, it should feature songs from most, if not all, of his film projects, and even Little Shop of Horrors will be included, likely with more numbers included than the other films. Here are a few highlights of my plans for arrangements for the album, should I find someone to help it come to fruition (ideally a keyboardist who is able to transfer my vision into a medium that other musicians would understand, and is just as mad as I am). From LSOH: "Somewhere that's Green" will be performed as if it is a Tom Waits song, likely with accompaniment coming only from piano to complement my gruff voice singing lines like "I look Like Donna Reed." Yeah. The cover of "Whole New World" from Aladdin is done in a similar alt-rock vein to the Carpenters tribute mentioned earlier, with an unusual intro: the first line "I can show you the world" is punctuated with a low, resonating chord sustained for upwards of half a minute before launching into the song proper, somewhat similar to this song. Enchanted's "True Love's Kiss" (The only one of his songs for that movie to not get an Oscar nomination) will be done in a similar style to Hurra Torpedo complete with the sounds of wrecking kitchen appliances. One strange idea I came up with follows: For the Film "Home on the Range," there were few songs that seemed to be worth covering, even though the villian is a cattle rustler who is also a virtuoso yodeler (I am not making this up), but one part caught my ear: Jennifer Tilly's character, to establish her tone-deafness, is singing a one-note (like Neil Young's solo in "Cinnamon Girl") version of "She'll be coming 'round the mountain." Hearing this, it hit upon me that, to represent this, I could redo the lyrics of that song with the music of another song similarly sung around one note; U2's "Numb." Yes, there will need to be more songs for the album, but it will need to be mentioned that the shadows of Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, and Sweeney Todd will hang over most of the rest of the songs on the album.

Film Idea of the Day: I am in the process of writing a short story about a couple (a psychiatrist and an english teacher) who celebrate the 25th anniversary of their first date one November evening in the same restaurant that the original had occurred, and the conflict between the man and a baby who just had to cry while "Their song" happened to be playing. Picture it as being in the tradition of Hemingway's "The Killers."

Film Review of the Day: Foxes. The film debut of Adrian Lyne, and the last film Jodie Foster made as a child star (before she went to Yale and went on a hiatus from acting), what I really loved about this movie was its cinematography. I have heard that every frame of Terence Malick's "Days of Heaven" looks like it could be mounted upon a wall as a work of art (I think Scorsese was the one who said it, but I'm not sure), and, in fact, while that may be true for Malick's film (it;s been a long time since I've seen it), watching Foxes, I can safely say that this actually holds true for this film as well. While, admittedly, Foxes has a forgettable plot which does not differentiate it very much from many of the other films in this genre, but it is truly in its photography that the movie saves itself.

Quote of the day: "A thunderstorm interrupted the celebration in Orleans in honor of Joan of Arc and the 477th anniversary of the defeat of the english."
____________Felix Feneon.

Issue 143

News/Review: I watched the Watchmen or, OMIGODTHISISTHEGREATESTMOVIEIVEEVERSEENINMYLIFE!!
As you might have inferred, I have recently seen the movie Watchmen, based upon the graphic novel. As you might have also inferred, I loved this movie! This movie could easily be one of my top five movies of all time. I recently read the graphic novel in preparation for the movie, and I have to say that even with many of the Graphic novels I've read in the past, this easily blows them all out of the water. As I had expected, the movie, unlike the other movies that had been said to be based upon Alan Moore's work, is almost a panel-for-shot remake in many places. Of course, a lot of moments I liked were missed (from Dr. Manhattan dispersing the crowd to the character arc that Rohrschach's psychiatrist goes through, as well as Rohrschach's pivotal experience with Kitty Genovese), but overall, Zack Snyder had enough reverence for the source material to keep meddling with new material to a minimum. However, some of the material that Snyder added was certainly welcome, particularly the opening credits scene, and especially within that Silhouette's homage to the famous V-J Day Kiss photos (FYI, I saw photos because there were two different photos of the same kiss.) Another thing I loved about the film was its music. There were three Bob Dylan songs, one of them a new, more managable cover by My Chemical Romance of "Desolation Row," as well as some classical music from the likes of Philip Glass, Wagner, and Mozart, three of my favorite composers, and, the icing on the cake, something not even Dr. Manhattan could have imagined (even with his fatalism underscored like in the graphic novel): two numbers by my favorite American singer-songwriter (because Canada counts here as American): Leonard Cohen. Two verses of his original version of Hallelujah underscore a sex scene between Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, and his song "First We Take Manhattan" is in the closing credits. Indeed, from my perspective Jackie Earle Haley and Patrick Wilson have done an incredibly great job in performing their characters. The other actors certainly try, but the rest are certainly missing something in their portrayals.

Band Name of the Day: Gunga Dinner. From a blimp in the Watchmen film and Graphic novel.

Film Idea of the Day: After being diagnosed with terminal cancer and disinherited by his family for not measuring up to his sister, he decides to get revenge. Believe me, it's a lot better in my head than it sounds here.

Quote of the Day: "Everything Fits in this world except people."
______________Watchmen.

Link of the Day: A site keeping track of the Watchmen universe.

Issue 137

News/Reviews: 2008 in film.
2008 was nowhere near the year for good movies that 2007 was. However, there were still a lot of good movies.
*THere Will Be Blood. I listed this in last year's entry as a film I had wanted to see but didn't. Fortunately, I waited a year to get this on DVD, and I must say that it was worth it, especially for the voices. A lot of movies from the 1920s to 1950s era had voices that had a distinctive quality to them that had become rare in films since, and this quality is especially missed in movies that take place in this period of time. Fortunately, Daniel Day Lewis seems to have done this very well. For this alone I highly recommend this movie, but the plot is also highly interesting as well, with the struggle for oil rights and the portrayal of religion are quite compelling in this day and age.
*Shine a Light. Well, Scorsese showed the Stones still going strong, covering some familiar territory, and many obscure gems I had never known before. By this point, that's all that needs to be said.
*Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I was never a big fan of big adventure stories and Indiana Jones' stories were not real exceptions to this rule. However, I still liked this movie. Of course, this was probably because of my ambivalence to the trilogy that I liked the trilogy, especially with the South Park episode about it in mind.
*WALL-E. I only watched this movie after I got the DVD, as with There Will Be Blood. However, especially keeping the other Pixar movies I remember, I am somewhat ambivalent, and I can assume that much of this was with the more serious tone than I had known with previous Pixar movies.
*Dark Knight. With this movie, I can finally take out the image of Heath Ledger as Patrick Verona in an ill-concieved teen version of Taming of the Shrew, and finally replace it with an image of him as the Joker. If not for his performance, I would have more or less not have cared for it at all, as with the other Burton-on Batman films.
*Hamlet II. Yes, the long-awaited sequel to William Shakespeare's hit play succeeds beyond our wildest expectations, especially my mother's.
Some I wish I had seen:
*Cassandra's Dream.
*Expelled. (I planned on refuting the arguments in this movie, but I didn't want to support Ben Stein, and my usual channels failed me. Of course, from what I heard, there's not much worth refuting)
*Vicky Christina Barcelona.
*Disaster Movie (if only to find out exactly why a drag queen would have to fight off the cast of Juno.)
*Religulous.
*Frost/Nixon
*Valkyrie.

Band Name of the Day: Bastards From Baskets. I've probably said too much.

Film Idea of the Day: Nothing now.

Quote of the Day: "It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this."
______________Lord Russell.

Link of the Day: A very unusual comic about a girl who used to be a boy, a Harvard student missing 2 years of his life, and the angel responsible for both.

Issue 130

News/Review A: Amadeus: The Play.
Last Wednesday, I went to see the play version of Amadeus, which was a film I had been frequently watching over the last few months. I must say that this play version was much better of a version of the story than the film was. Of course, the movie was certainly one of the best films of 1984, if not the 1980s. I must note that one of the major things is that this version effectively makes Salieri an unreliable narrator, thus excusing the poor history (justifiable as it is for the purpose of the plot). The reason the unreliable narrator excuses the poor history is because, unlike in the film version, Salieri admits that his claim to have killed Mozart was a ruse to make people remember him forever, since by this point, Salieri's music will forever become subordinate in virtually every way to Mozart's music. Interestingly enough, the people who hear about his claims seem to entirely reject it, at the end, thus making his last plan towards his proverbial immortality another failure for the time being, at least until poets from Pushkin to Schaffer find the entire plan makes great literature. On another note, I'm not sure whether it is this production of the play, the movie, or the article about Ken Branagh's practically unreleased film version of the opera, but my curiosity towards getting into Mozart's Magic Flute is now peaking. Perhaps this will help me get into the man's music in addition to the man himself (despite the fact that about 70% of my classical music intake is from German composers, Mozart has yet to become one of those I listen to, although Glenn Gould may have something to do with this). In conclusion, I must say that the original play version of Amadeus was much better than the film version. Maybe the Powers That Be at Great Performances should do a TV special of the play version as a complement to the film version, but until that happens, let's just be content with the film, and the occasional performances of the play.

Film Idea of the Day: Desolation Revisited. A man ends up in an affair with a physically scarred preacher's wife and slowly gets insight into the desolate lives of the people in her area that could have ended up making enough material for several Eugene O'Neill plays.

Film Review of the Day B: American Beauty. A decade ago, many critics were saying that this film could very well become one of the greatest films of all time. After it won the Best Picture Oscar, however, this praise ended up abating... Until Now. I must say that the movie has actually managed to live up to the ten-year old hype I either forgot about or never heard until after I actually saw the movie for the first time last week. Definitely one of the best films of the 1990s.
And this isn't just because it is revealed at one point that it takes place in my general area (due to the shared area code).

Quote of the Day: "I speak for all mediocrities in the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint."
__________Antonio Salieri, Amadeus.

Link of the Day: Witch's Brew: A Dadaist webcomic about whatever the artists feel like.

Tract Review: First Bite. A strangely Alfalfa-like vampire named Igor is born of a woman named Vampyra. Every lame Vampiritic cliche aside, this ends in a way that few vampire stories, but virtually every Chick tract, winds up ending; Igor gets saved. One wonders if he still would retain his bloodlust.

Issue 127

News: Didactic Cloudcuckoolanderism, or CAPAlert II: Electric Boogaloo.
In December, I mentioned and criticized CAPalert in one entry. Recently, I decided to email them about one of their articles, which stated that basically, because movies often tend to not reflect daily life of many people in the most extreme cases, (taking several examples from Natural Born Killers), but, as one may have guessed, Fundies tend to not cotton to differing opinions. When I made my point that just because things don't happen often in one's daily life, this doesn't mean that it's not representative of the real world, the person answering my email frequently brought up Spiderman. Of course, just because one never got bitten by a radioactive spider and gained superpowers, never means that one never went through many of the same things that Peter Parker went through. Of course, after reading their reply to a section where I paraphrased Robert McKee's speech in Adaptation in response to Charlie Kaufman's claim that "nothing happens in real life", I suddenly realized something; Somewhere, a point was missed entirely, perhaps it was when they said movies are not representative of the real world, or perhaps when I said that art does often reflect real life, or maybe when it became clear that their focus was not on what was, but on what should be, which are two entirely different concepts to me, but apparently not to CAPalert. Sure, kids shouldn't see American Psycho until they're old enough to see that Patrick Bateman is not in any way a role model, but maybe the films themselves should not be criticized solely on moral grounds, but maybe what should be criticized are parents who allow young children to watch these movies, and any non-children who assume that characters in films should be good role models to children, whether or not children are intended to see said movie. I'm not replying to them via email, because, as I said, Fundies don't cotton to differing opinions, and accordingly, they appear to have blocked my email address. The Moral of the Story: Never debate with fundamentalists, because it's not worth it. Oh, well. If you want to keep taking the blue pill and join John Gardner, feel free to do so while I take my red.

Band Name of the Day: Chicken Corn Whores. Apparently from a sight my family witnessed at a farm in Door County earlier in the summer.

Film Idea of the Day: A study of the antecedents and the aftermath of the public suicide of a Nazi War criminal.

Film Review of the Day: Brideshead Revisited. I recently saw the movie, and while I had not read the book, I did enjoy the movie, although I'm sure much of the reason I enjoyed it was because of the fact that I had not read the book, since the movie was apparently gleamed of much of the subplots in order to fit into a 100-minute film. Of course, even with the questionable ending, I would give the film thumbs up.

Quote of the Day: " Every poem, it is said, should inculcate a moral; and by this moral is the poetical merit of the work to be adjudged. We Americans especially have patronized this happy idea; and we Bostonians, very especially, have developed it in full. We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem's sake, and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true Poetic dignity and force:--but the simple fact is, that, would we permit ourselves to look into our own souls, we should immediately there discover that under the sun there exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified--more supremely noble than this very poem--this poem per se--this poem which is a poem and nothing more--this poem written solely for the poem's sake."
_______________Edgar Allen Poe.

Link of the Day: Garfield Without Garfield: A webcomic.

Issue 121

News/ Review of the Day: The Bratz Cult. (This issue may or may not have been guest authored by James Lipton.)
When I first discovered this movie in the trailers leading up to Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, I assumed that it would either be a classic on par with ...if, or the biggest bomb dropped since they stopped bomb testing in Nevada. Little did I know that it would be both. It would only be a matter of a few months before I would be able to watch it when I got the DVD (since my usual channels of gaining such films had failed me), shocking my mother even more than the purchase of Natural Born Killers I had announced to her only moments before. What I saw astounded me. With its blatantly obviously failed attempts at satire (from the school-enforced cliques [including, bizarrely, students who "liked to dress like dinosaurs", which meant putting dinosaur paraphernalia on standard clothes] to blatantly obvious homages to other current fixtures of teenage culture, like High School Musical and Super Sweet Sixteen) and completely outlandish sights treated as if they were completely normal (including several of the aforementioned cliques, a girl undergoing her second Sweet Sixteen on a whim, and contortionist-violinists), I am surprised that there aren't more people who share opinions of this film as I do: It's so bad, it's good (or, in a neologism one student creates, "awesomeful"), on par with virtually everything of note that Ed Wood has done or Manos: The Hands of Fate. It's as if the makers of the film were playing an elaborate joke, hoping that the barely-pubescent teenyboppers this film seemed to be marked towards would get the story of friendship, but that everybody else would notice what I did, but they clearly didn't, if most of the reviews of this movie I've seen are any note. It's about time that people started noticing this movie for what it is; a trainwreck so bad, it somehow turns out good. Maybe in a few years, this movie will end up undergoing a second birth, with another run in theaters, people dressing up as and quoting characters in the movie, and possibly even a drinking game where the viewer must drink a shot of vodka whenever something absurd happens, and double whenever the characters make note of it. Of course, this may be too much, especially the drinking game, but it could happen. In fact, if this manages to become common enough, I would be quite pleasantly surprised.

Band Name of the day: Awesomeful. From the above movie I just reviewed/borderline hagiographied.

Film Idea of the Day: A Teenager rises to fame, his parents manipulate him for his money and fame, sometimes blackmailing him, and he ends up defiantly exiting it all, only to end up like Lemuel Pitkin in A Cool Million post-mortem.

Quote of the Day: "My South Will Rise Again"
_______Robert E. Lee, Squidbillies, this is the worst double endendre ever in what may possibly be the most bizarre Adult Swim ever.

Link of the Day: A short listing of some of the most evil sections of The Bible.