In Memory of My Dumb Friends

Follow me to my new blog

2010-06-07T09:33:00.000-07:00

This blog has been dormant for a while now as I've been building my new website - and now the new blog portion is up, too! Check it out!

See you there...and farewell to Dumb Friends!

Tom's Dream

2010-04-07T00:41:00.001-07:00

Tom's Dream from Nathan Jongewaard on Vimeo.

In the place where you sleep

2010-04-06T23:55:00.001-07:00

Effing Right On

2010-03-30T00:19:00.001-07:00

Maine Event

2009-11-04T10:55:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, voters in Maine voted to strip marriage rights from gays and lesbians, which had been granted by the passage of a law in May. Maine's version of California's woeful Proposition 8, which rejected gay marriage in last year's general election, was backed by the usual suspects, including the National Organization for Marriage, of the infamous "Gathering Storm" ad. Pretty pathetic.

It's time to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). The notion that this crucial civil rights issue should be left to the voters of each state to decide is ludicrous. What would have happened if we had allowed each state to decide when to grant civil rights to blacks? If there had been no Civil Rights Act?

Maybe someone can explain to me - slowly and using small words, because I'm a bit dim - how this is different? DOMA, and "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" with it, enshrined prejudice in law. It's time to move on and grant to LGBT people the equality they are owed under our Constitution. If some people in the country don't like it, tough. Change is hard, but this change is inevitable, so we might as well get used to it, and get on with it.

Allowing gays and lesbians to marry under civil law will strengthen families, not weaken them. It will help children, not harm them. It will have no impact on religious freedom in the U.S. whatsoever. To oppose these civil rights is to be an opponent of civil rights, period. It is shameful, it is irrational, it is wrong.

The Rock

2009-10-17T22:45:00.000-07:00

30 Rock came back for a fourth season on Thursday, getting lower ratings than the previous season's opener. It was not the greatest episode of the show, but a solid, good one and, besides, they have set the bar impossibly high. British sitcoms get 12 shows a season, like the shows on HBO and Showtime. How Tina Fey and company manage to keep their brilliantly wacky, razor-sharp and caustic show as funny as it is, week after week, is something of a miracle. What do Americans want from their TV shows? People complain that the characters on Rock aren't "likable." That's a criticism? How did Seinfeld last so long then? Or All in the Family? Or any reality TV show?

I think maybe Rock is just too inside-show-business for a mainstream audience, and way, way too smart. I do not watch every comedy show on TV - though I've started watching a couple of promising new shows this season, Community and Modern Family - but I would sure like to see a funnier sitcom than 30 Rock. I doubt one exists right now. It ain't Parks and Recreation, though that show is picking up some steam in its second season. It ain't The Office, which peaked three or four season ago, in my opinion.

From what I understand, the best drama on TV, Mad Men, also doesn't get great ratings. This season has been Sopranos good. Is there a better show on TV?

On Nostalgia, or things to do in Alameda with friends you don't see often enough

2009-10-12T22:21:00.000-07:00

My old friend, Clint Marsh, tells me that my posts tend to go on too long. So, for his sake, as he's one of maybe three people who ever read this blog, I'll keep it short.

This past Saturday was a celebration of nostalgia, both nostalgic for me on several levels and about nostalgia in odd ways. A combination of a couple of Ancient Greek words, nostalgia literally means "aching to return home," and was originally coined to describe a kind of homesickness. I can only say that these days, ye gods, I ache.

In the morning, I wandered up Park Street, which was closed off once again for the annual classic car show. I am not really a car person any more, admittedly more for political reasons than because I don't actually love awesome cars, a huge variety of which were on display on Saturday.

The above was one of my favorites, almost certainly out of nostalgia for my childhood Hot Wheels. No matter how you feel about a particular hobby that you don't engage in yourself - such as, say, one that celebrates huge, resource-hogging machines that have contributed mightily to the destruction of the environment, our sense of interconnectedness, community and place, not to mention the public health over the last century - it is wonderful to see so much geeky enthusiasm and joy on display. Besides, some of these cars are really fucking cool.

After the car show and requisite breakfast burrito from Viva Mexico, Thomas Carlson came over. I've known him since high school, when I was dating his older sister, still a dear friend I barely ever get to see, so hanging out with Tom always has a faint corona of nostalgia, and a longing for home. We went to the Alameda Theatre to see the re-released Toy Story 1 & 2 double-feature in 3D. These movies, still among the very best Pixar has put out, have nostalgia as their subject. That got me thinking that I would like to see a database of movie subject matter - I mean, there are a lot of movies that make you feel nostalgic, TS1&2 among them, but how many are about nostalgia, for example?

The 3D aspect was fairly subtle, but enhancing, and we agreed that TS2 is still one of the all-time greatest movie sequels, one of those rarest of sequels that manage to top the original, like The Godfather, Part 2 or Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn.

We got back home and found that Clint had just arrived, in time for the evening's nostalgia to begin.

There was, of course, the usual Ottumwa gossip and chitchat, then delivery from Dragon Rouge, the great Vietnamese Bistro on Encinal between Park and Oak. Clint figured out that this Dragon Rouge was not this Dragon Rouge, then the three of us went across town to the Lucky JuJu.

It was my first time there, but I don't know what Alameda attraction can top, for good times or nostalgia with a capital P, the Pacific Pinball Museum at the Lucky JuJu arcade. Just go: Go! - and in the flash and tumult, the spinning bells and bright lights, surrender, as a boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Defending Copyright or Corporate Censorship? You say tomato...

2009-10-05T10:28:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, as the inevitable fallout from David Letterman's who-gives-a-shit "sex scandal" began to drift down from on high like magical cable-news-ratings-booster pixie dust, this word from the New York Times, letting us know about CBS scrambling to scrub the Web of Dave's on-air mea culpa from Thursday night's show. Never mind that there are plenty of "Late Show" clips online, whether on YouTube, CBS's official TV.com or everywhere else, somehow only these specific clips are causing copyright concerns.

Does CBS have the legal authority to take down these clips? Sure, though no one could fully explain to you why they would bother - logically, that is. But this is obviously a case of a mega-corporation using copyright law (specifically the DMCA) to censor clips they don't want the public to have a chance to view, which makes it a perfect example of the deep flaws in our current system of "intellectual property."

Vegemite, Delicious Vegemite

2009-09-12T00:54:00.000-07:00

Saw on Boing Boing today a mention of a ludicrously restrictive Terms of Use agreement over at the Kraft Corporation site for their product, Vegemite, apparently a delicious Australian spread that I have heard mixed reviews of, let's say, from people who have actually eaten it, which I have not. Evidently, you are not allowed to link to the site "in any way whatsover."

And you can check it out on their site by following this link.

The Mastick House

2009-09-09T12:29:00.001-07:00

Passed by here on the weekly bike ride. The sign in the yard caught my attention. If you click through on the picture, you'll see a bigger size and you'll be able to read it, hopefully. As if the school board recall effort and lawsuit over the gay anti-bullying curriculum wasn't proof enough, this picture further demonstrates that there are idiots everywhere.

In case anyone is wondering, the answer to the question posed by the sign is Hawaii. The question refers to Barack Obama's birth certificate.

Sunday Morning

2009-09-05T23:38:00.000-07:00

Record Club: Velvet Underground & Nico 'Sunday Morning' from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.

The Garden

2009-08-30T00:18:00.001-07:00

Just finished watching Scott Hamilton Kennedy's superb 2008 documentary, The Garden. The film tells the story of the South Central Farm which, at 14 acres, was perhaps the largest urban farm in the United States, located in South Central Los Angeles. Farmed by 350 mostly poor, mostly Latino families, for subsistence purposes, the story of the "garden" is a riveting tale of craven politicians, spectacular self-sufficiency as a response to poverty, extraordinary courage, deep-seated racism and soul-shattering greed. It's a heartbreaking story that tell us everything we need to know about human rights in the Unites States in the early 21st century. Everyone needs to see this film.

Lego of My First Amendment Rights!

2009-08-18T19:38:00.000-07:00

This story is a week old now, but I've been away and I had to make a comment about it, because it's just ridiculous and a perfect example of corporate censorship due to abuse of intellectual property law. Here's the rundown:

Spinal Tap has been on tour, a kind of acoustic, old-timers tour (called "Unwigged and Unplugged"), which is pretty funny in and of itself. In addition to playing Tap songs and Folksmen songs, they joke around and show videos and stuff. Here's one of the videos, which was made by a high school kid and uploaded to YouTube and which Tap loved:

They loved it so much, for obvious reasons, that they actually played it at their shows. So this was all fine and good until it came time to put out a DVD of the tour, which would have included some of the kid's Lego video. Long story short, Lego balked.

Julie Stern, a Lego spokesdrone, told the New York Times, "We love that our fans are so passionate and creative with our products. But it had some inappropriate language, and the tone wasn't appropriate for our target audience of kids 6 to 12." (Because corporations apparently have the right to dictate, under the threat of a lawsuit, how consumers use their products.) The article continues:

"Kia Kamran, an intellectual property lawyer representing Spinal Tap, said the band could have prevailed had Lego sued alleging copyright infringement, because Mr. Hickey’s video does not show the brand’s logo and is satirical. But the band did not deem the fight worth the expense, he said. 'In my heart of hearts, I do think this is fair use' of copyrighted material, Mr. Kamran said."

And, after explaining that numerous Lego parody videos exist on YouTube, some with much more "inappropriate" content and pointing out that Lego has not attempted to take them down, the article returns to the aptly named Ms. Stern:

“'YouTube is a less commercial use,' Ms. Stern said. 'But when you get into a more commercial use, that’s when we have to look into the fact that we are a trademarked brand, and we really have to control the use of our brand, and our brand values.'"

Finally, the kid (Coleman Hickey, now 16) who made the video, after acknowledging his disappointment says, "It’s not like I was going to get any money for it, but it’s too bad. Lego has the right to do that, but it’s unfortunate that they don’t have a little more of a sense of humor.”

First of all, young Coleman, Lego does NOT have the "right" to do this. It is not your fault that you think this is the case, because we have allowed corporations to control the way young people are taught about intellectual property and the propaganda that they release is almost never challenged by the news media (which are, of course, almost entirely owned by the same corporations). Lego is merely throwing its weight around because they judged, correctly, that Spinal Tap would not want to pay the gigabucks required to fight them in court - NOT because they thought they had a legitimate case. Who can blame the band? Tap is three comedians in their 60s milking their most popular act prior to retirement. Lego is a privately held Danish company worth hundreds of millions, if not several billion, dollars.

Yeah, it's unfortunate that Lego doesn't have a sense of humor; it's more unfortunate that corporations are allowed to strong-arm artists (whether they are corporate artists or not) and effectively prevent them from exercising their First Amendment right of free speech without getting smacked down. The term for this is "prior restraint."

Second, the writer of this article blithely goes along with - or even creates - the impression that Lego was somehow asserting copyright in this case, by attributing the notion that, if Tap had used the video and Lego had sued, the suit would be based on a claim of copyright, to an IP lawyer (notice, however, that he's not actually quoted saying that). But that's a highly specious assertion.

The United States Copyright Office defines copyright as "a form of protection grounded in the U.S. Constitution and granted by law for original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression. Copyright covers both published and unpublished works." Further, copyright protects "original works of authorship including literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic works, such as poetry, novels, movies, songs, computer software, and architecture. Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation, although it may protect the way these things are expressed."

Note that plastic toys do not seem to be one of the protected categories. However, this is not made explicitly clear, as it would perhaps be a waste of time to attempt to list all of the specific things in the world copyright does not protect. Plus, since copyright applies to artworks like sculptures, perhaps a lawyer could make the case that Legos are sculptures and therefore subject to copyright.

It doesn't matter, though, because this dispute is not about a copy of Legos. It's about a depiction of Legos in a video and whether that video can be incorporated into another video. Legos used to be under a patent that prevented other companies from marketing similar plastic bricks, but that patent expired in 1988. Trademark law prohibits someone from calling their similar plastic brick a "Lego," but not from calling it anything else. Trademark certainly does not have anything to say about your "brand values," whatever the fuck that corporatist oxymoron is supposed to mean. Nope, all trademark means is that someone can't make the exact same thing that you do and call it the exact same thing that you call it.

Common sense - and case law, which is mostly all we have to go on in this type of case, since there is not much that is explicit about IP laws and these cases can only be decided by going to court - would seem to suggest that neither copyright, trademark or patent protections apply in this case. Maybe look at it this way: If you owned a Mustang, what's happened here is the equivalent of the Ford Motor Company telling you can't put your Mustang in a movie. If you are under the impression that this is Ford's "right," then you, too, have succumbed to the aggressive propaganda by which corporations have been siphoning up our rights as citizens when it comes to freedom of expression.

As a kid, Legos were my favorite toy, for many years. Now, they largely suck because they went from being a highly interchangeable creative building toy to being sold in super-specialized packs with much less interchangeability and much more cross-branding. That alone is a real shame; but what the company has done in this instance is simply a disgrace.

U.S. Airways: Worst Airline Ever?

2009-08-12T04:36:00.000-07:00

So, I'm leaving today on trip for a few days. I'm flying from Oakland to Albany, New York. In order to do this, I have to fly to Phoenix, then Detroit, then Albany. It's going to take twelve hours and three flights. There was no simpler way.

Last night around 7 PM I get a robo-call from U.S. Airways letting me know that my first flight has been canceled. Instead of leaving at 9 AM, they are going to put me on a flight at 6, meaning getting up at 4 AM. The reason given for the cancellation is "routine, scheduled maintenance." So, I got up at 4 - and so did my wife and infant son, because she's driving me to the airport.

I went to the U.S. Airways website. My new 6 AM flight has been delayed. It now leaves at 8:50. I called the phone number to confirm and the reason given for the delay is that "the crew was required to complete a mandatory rest period."

I want them to maintain their planes; I want the crew to be rested. But this kind of thing is just a perverse jerking-around of a customer who is already paying too much to make a ridiculous all-day tour of the country, compounded by Orwellian lies. Insult to injury, I think that's called.

If you can avoid flying U.S. Airways, do so. But, like me, you probably can't.

Public Enemies

2009-07-28T19:05:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I finally saw Michael Mann's new gangster movie, Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp as John Dillinger and Christian Bale as Melvin Purvis, the G-Man on his trail. I've been an admirer of Mann's for years, if not precisely a fan (or fanatic), and the qualities for which I've most admired him are well displayed here: restless, creative risk-taking to the limits of big-budget studio filmmaking, technological experimentation and almost casually virtuosic direction of action set pieces.

From the general audience standpoint, only the latter quality really matters. Most viewers will have no idea that they just watched a film that was not shot on film at all, but in high definition video, let alone that Mann changed frame rates a couple of times in the film to deliberately make it look like video as we're used to seeing it on TV, rather than video aping the frame rate of standard film projection (24 frames per second). This is not to say that these techniques do not affect the audience, necessarily. Most people just don't notice them and don't care about them.

In my book, this is how it should be. Technology - yes, even spectacular FX - ought not be noticed as such. An audience should be too busy engaging with the film on some human level, like emotionally or intellectually, to notice how well the technology works. For people like me, this is sometimes difficult, because we are too steeped in filmmaking itself to fail to notice the man behind the curtain, as it were. Though a small group over all, there are plenty of film fans who fall into this category. We can talk about Mann's color palette, which HD camera he used, why he shot this period film in an almost documentary style and what was behind his decision to sometimes shoot at a higher frame rate, thereby making scenes inspired by 30s newsreels appear to have been filmed by present-day cable news crews. Is this aesthetic choice a sly commentary on John Dillinger's celebrity, suggesting that things haven't changed all that much in America? Maybe, but why make such a commentary in a way guaranteed to sail over the heads of most viewers? Will they simply sense this aspect, without quite being able to put their fingers on it? (Or perhaps his critique is too commonplace, made many times before in superior films like Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands, to name two in a similar vein, as well as in many films of various quality, to have much impact.)

Whether the audience can sense the subtler changes that digital cinema can bring to the moviegoing experience is a pretty interesting question, for some, and it's questions like that that make Public Enemies an interesting film, for some. But this kind of experience is awfully cerebral, disappointingly so for a film packed with superb actors and based on such terrific characters and fascinating history. Barely anything human in the film registered with me - the only character I was really interested in was Billy Crudup's winking, bow-legged, feral J. Edgar Hoover. I applaud Mann for understanding we did not to see an elaborate backstory for Dillinger or his nemesis, for trusting his audience enough to drop us right into the action, but this does not mean every character should be a cipher. We all like Johnny Depp, but we still need a character. Christian Bale registers even less - practically anyone could have played the role to equal or greater effect. Marion Cotillard serves only a vague (and elsewhere wholly disregarded) historicity as Dillinger's girlfriend, Billie Frechette, but the affair delivers no chemistry, no romance, and only meager story- and plot-related value. Why is she even here?

Some of Mann's story choices, as friends have pointed out to me, are bold. There is no "final confrontation" scene between Depp and Bale, for example; instead, Dillinger's last words after he's gunned down are delivered to a supporting character, who tells them to Frechette in the final scene. This is one of many small ways Mann rejects conventional Hollywood storytelling - the almost complete lack of expository detail is another - and these are smart, interesting choices. I believe that this can be done, though, while still finding room for the kind of genuine, specific, shocking, documentary humanity that is required for truly engaging, full-throated storytelling.

As a postscript, I would add that it's truly weird to watch a film set in the early 1930s in which, perhaps, two cigarettes are seen. A key moment at the end of the film has Bale lighting a cigar to signal the other Feds that Dillinger has left the building - only, unless I blinked and missed it, we don't even see him light the cigar. We see the cigar, we see the matches, we see him raising a lit match out of frame, then on to something else. As an artistic choice, this smoking ban is fine, albeit weirdly and totally inaccurate, if that's really what was wanted. Except, that's not the story - this is just corporate self-censorship to spare us the shock of seeing Johnny Depp and Christian Bale smoke. The movie is already rated R. So what gives?

Polymeric Thin Films

2009-07-24T01:29:00.000-07:00

That would be a good name for a film company, by which I mean a motion picture company. I often write about that kind of film, but the Google Advertising Bot advertised about the polymeric thin kind.

Additional thoughts

2009-07-21T09:54:00.000-07:00

The previous post limns my disgust with Ben Stein's piss-poorly reasoned pro-Intelligent Design film, Expelled, although I didn't go into much detail on what I felt was so weak about his argument. Today, I've read an interesting piece by The Ethicist, in his weekly "Moral of the Story" column. On the subject of the current war over health care in the Congress, Cohen asks, "Is some debate so suspect as to be unethical?"

That's an interesting question - what he means is, when you're a politician or political operative making public statements and arguments on a contentious topic, such as whether there ought to be a "public option," do you have any kind of ethical responsibility to argue from logic employing truthful information or is it permissible to just lie your ovoid, turd-blossomy head off?

What do you think The Ethicist has to say about that?

As it relates to the Stein film, if you watch it you'll notice that the smug, arrogant, condescending Stein is about as lazy and partisan in his approach to his issue as many Republicans have been in considering the health care issue. It's as easy, and as devoid of any actual meaning, to simply say that Obama's a "socialist" as it is for Stein to hint that those who agree that evolution is science fact are Nazis. Or tantamount to Nazis. Or whatever he was saying.

Baby with the bathwater

2009-07-20T20:10:00.000-07:00

Recently, I have seen two very different documentaries on two very controversial topics.

Tony Kaye's 2006 Lake of Fire is a harrowing, 2 1/2 hour black and white take on abortion, a great piece of work. It manages to be convincingly balanced, giving time to many different voices, from crazies advocating the murder of abortion providers to Jane Roe herself to Pat Buchanan, Dershowitz and old man Chomsky, as well as to a number of mere mortals, and lesser creatures, such as Randall Terry. It's tough going, with graphic images of abortions and relentless craziness, no matter what your personal beliefs. Dershowitz and loony Chomsky are very amusing, at points, and right on target, of course. The film is worth seeing for its clarity and compassion for all its subjects - it will make you stop and consider your own attitudes more closely. I am curious to know more about how the final scenes were constructed - whether some events were restaged or if multiple cameras were used - but either way, a serious, thought-provoking documentary.

Also provocative, though I know not what of, is Nathan Frankowski's Ben Stein starrer Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a well-shot but smug and disappointingly boneheaded film about academic freedom vis-a-vis Intelligent Design. Sadly, for him, Stein is also credited as a writer. The film makes an important point about the dangers of squelching academic freedom - in this case, in the way that (according to the film) many scientists have been ostracized, even to the point of ending careers, for the sin of expressing an open mind toward Intelligent Design - which is that science must always be willing to question its own assumptions, no matter how entrenched. Scientists must be willing - and have the freedom - to be wrong, in the name of seeking truth.

Scientists seek what we might call natural truth. Evolution by means of natural selection is such a natural truth; an accepted law of biology. Biologists who do not accept this are heretical, and few, but this is not necessarily a reason to fire them. However, religious faith is not in conflict with biology. There are plenty of religious Darwinists (the film's perjorative term for anyone who believes in evolution) who have no trouble whatsoever balancing these two worldviews. Indeed, I think most people are capable of holding multiple views on a single topic without feeling that they have to choose only one. This is what makes the extreme views on the topic of origins so perplexing - atheists who categorically insist on the non-existence of God and fundamentalists who insist that, I don't know, the earth is actually a six thousand year old walnut.

What Stein and Company do here is skate over the surface of an issue that could really use a compassionate, clear-eyed exploration, as in Lake of Fire. Instead, Expelled is hideous propaganda in sheep's clothing; I mean, for the love of Jesus H. Christ, by the end Stein is literally comparing proponents of evolution to Nazis. You see, the Nazis used eugenics theories based on Darwinism to justify the murder of the Jews. So that's where Darwin's theories lead. In other words, if some crazy-evil bastards twist science-based ideas beyond recognition to further their crazy evil, we should question the validity of the science? That's as stupid as the argument that says we should be atheists because bad things have been done in the name of religion. That's throwing out the baby with the bathwater. And, disturbingly, Stein goes to Dachau to make this argument. Look what evolution did! It killed 6 million Jews. Watch out, lest evolution do it again! Stein is Jewish, but he has no trouble trading on this unspeakable horror perpetrated against his own people to argue a totally unrelated and truly fatuous point.

There was a time when I respected Ben Stein. I thought he was a smart guy, even if I didn't always agree with him. But this film shows that he's just one more shallow, opportunistic conservative media whore. Now he's doing commercials for Comcast. Can he sink any lower?

Okay, I'll talk about copyright for a second

2009-07-16T16:09:00.000-07:00

I have so far largely avoided talking about one of my pet issues on this blog, namely the tangle of thorns known as the current take on copyright law in the U.S. I've avoided it mostly so I wouldn't end up writing only about this topic, though I have mentioned it on occasion, because in my experience people hate this issue and find it incredibly boring. I'd like to tackle it at some point, though, and try to make it interesting to people, and try to make it matter to them. I think fixing our broken copyright system matters a great deal and gets to the very heart of our democracy, our First Amendment right to free speech.

Today, though, I just wanted to mention a very specific case. Back in February, I wrote about the Oscars which had just been handed out. At the time, I embedded a YouTube clip from the broadcast of a skit performed by Seth Rogen and James Franco as their Pineapple Express characters. It was a hilarious skit, one of the (few) highlights of the telecast and, after watching PE again the other night, I wanted to watch the skit again.

Alas, when I went to my post to watch the embedded clip, I clicked on it and got this message instead: "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by AMPAS Oscars." In other words, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which hands out the Oscars and produces the awards show, did not authorize that clip to be shown on YouTube. I'd like to point out a few things about this:

First, if you followed the above link back to that post, you'll notice I have reembedded the clip from a different website. AMPAS's takedown request was completely useless, even though it seems to have been effective with regard to YouTube, because there are hundreds of other video sharing sites on the Web and once a popular clip has been passed around it's as near to impossible as makes no difference to take it down. The fast Google search I performed to find the clip somewhere other than YouTube yielded dozens of sites on the first results page. Bottom line: this brand of corporate censorship - oh, what? you think that's not the right word? you want me to grab a dictionary? - literally does not work.

Second, I'd like to know by what reasonable calculation the Academy loses one stinking dime by allowing fans to share a clip like this. I don't see it on their website. I don't see it exclusively licensed to another site, like Funny or Die. Is AMPAS going to release the clip in some other form, for instance, an Oscar highlights DVD? Maybe they will - and if that's the plan, would someone walk me through how leaving the clip up on YouTube fucks up that plan? Maybe you think that the argument is that no one would buy the DVD, or download, or whatever, if the clip was available for free. Really? How do you know that? How do you know that the kind of person who would actually buy such a DVD even knows that YouTube exists? How do you know that, even if they know the clip is on YouTube, that they wouldn't buy the DVD for the far superior quality and for all the other clips that such a DVD would theoretically contain? The truth is, no one has any idea but I would suggest that the tiny little market for such a DVD would not be hurt - in fact, with the right kind of promotion, it could be helped - by allowing that clip to be seen online.

Third, fuck AMPAS and its cadre of overpaid lawyers, billing hours just to justify their retainers. This is the kind of reflexive, thoughtless, overzealous, anti-consumer, anti-fan copyright protectionism that we, the people, need to crush like a mob hit in a trash compactor. This is the toughest aspect of the problem, though - getting "the people" to care about any of this. Much in the same way that some people are not in favor of taxing the wealthiest Americans a bit more to provide important services for poorer people because they think they themselves are going to be rich someday, even though there is almost no chance of that (amidst many other, much better arguments for the stupidity of their position), other folks think that the draconian copyright protections lobbied for and won by the media corporations might help them out when they create valuable content one day. Which they almost certainly will not. The "common sense" argument, that, well, of course AMPAS should take down the content, because it's their property, deserves a longer dissection than I feel like doing right now, but I will come back to it.

Fourth, and finally, at some point a different kind of common sense will have to prevail, by which media corporations will realize that they aren't getting anywhere with this type of behavior. Like the political argument that says the war on terror has ended up creating more terrorists, the war on "piracy" will only create more pirates. That is, when I hear that some mom in the Midwest - whatever her true motives - did some minor music sharing and so now has to fork over a million bucks to the recording industry, it makes me want to steal music and give it away to everyone I know. Ah, but will I actually do so? So, my hating the industry for being total dicks, so long as I don't steal anything, is of no concern?

The James Mangold Episode

2009-07-14T19:19:00.000-07:00

When I was in film school, we would frequently have guest artist seminars, which I believe were "mandatory." There were a number of memorable guests - Martin Landau was the best, but we also saw Melvin van Peebles, Sally Menke and this awesome dolly grip. Another time, James Mangold brought his Johnny Cash biopic, Walk the Line. The school is the California Institute of the Arts, in Valencia, CA - Mangold is an alumnus, which I assume by some largess is how we got such a screening. CalArts almost never previewed current Hollywood films for their students - not artsy enough! Around the same time, some marketeers wanted to preview Hard Candy, an "edgy," but mediocre indie thriller starring Ellen Page, but the faculty canceled the screening on the basis of its not being good enough a film, I presume.

Typically, a guest artist for the film directing program would show a film or films and then have a Q&A.

I often find myself thinking about the Mangold screening. Prior to attending grad school, I had seen two James Mangold films, Heavy and Cop Land. I had a good opinion of him; I hadn't known about his CalArts connection before I went there. I can still recall his first film, Heavy, with its sensitive portrayal of a shy outcast, beautifully played by Pruitt Taylor Vince. Cop Land was fine and basically I thought he was a filmmaker who was slowly "going Hollywood" but had managed to hang on to a point of view and a level of quality that I respected, if not revered.

And actually, now that I think about it, it was one of our faculty, Gill Dennis, the film's writer, who hooked up the screening. I remember we filed into our cinema, the Bijou, built at the center of the art school's high modern superstructure, deep beneath the crust of the earth. Well, maybe not that deep. At the door, we had to surrender any digital acquisition devices - cameras, cell phones, bionics - that might compromise the studio's copyrights; I had none such.

I liked Walk the Line. I went in expecting just a bit less than what I got, which is always good. After all, it was a Hollywood movie, with stars - a studio-made pre-packaged hit. As such, for whatever year that was, it was a good movie. Quality product. Hollywood is what it is; if you're going to bitch and moan about everything studio - well, what's the fun in that? Studios have made great films and they still do - though WTL is not quite one of them, it's a well-made, entertaining film with bedazzling star performances and plaudits well-deserved. Me, I just feel like I'd rather see Johnny Cash in Space, in which the reincarnated Man in Black cleans up a one-speeder Martian frontier town, than a straightforward biopic, but I guess we need at least one of those, too.

At that time, as always, I was trying to do a lot of writing and struggling with it as usual. Gill Dennis was up on stage with Mangold, who was fielding a few questions after the screening. Per later analysis, our general impression of James Mangold, meaning amongst myself and my friends, was "D-Bag." Just, Hollywood douchery. But that's to be expected. Think about it - if you have success in Hollywood, it changes you. You don't necessarily realize how you come across to the Normals. You're not trying to be a D-Bag.

But, anyway, I asked him a question. The question was actually to elicit an answer from Gill, as well as Mangold. I wanted to know about the process of telling a well-known true story in terms of writing a screenplay - how do you know what to leave in, or out, or change factually to serve a dramatic necessity? My mistake was in the way I asked the question - I asked, What compromises did you have to make between the facts of Johnny Cash's real life and the dramatization of that life? I gave the question more context than that (explaining my interest in the writing process), but the key word here is compromises.

Mangold rejected that word. "We didn't make any compromises, really." He went on to talk about his and Gill's access to the Cashes, or something. The point is, he misunderstood my question in a way that really underscored the whole douchey thing, although it was my mistake - compromise was a bad choice of words. This guy was from Hollywood; they don't "compromise" there. They win. This was a shame from my perspective because I really did want to know about the practical and philosophical issues raised by writing history, biography in particular. But this guy was only interested in talking about his cock.

Just kidding, Mangold! It's cool - and the truth is, at the time, I just thought it was a funny little exchange, was bummed that I didn't get my question answered properly but accepted it. Afterward, however, a number of friends and associates came up to me and let me know how they felt about the way Mangold had failed to answer my question. In fact, all that stuff about douche bags probably came from them. What your friends say influences you. I didn't really know how to feel about the brush-off. I had very conscientiously tried to phrase my question in a neutral way. The last thing I wanted was to be seen as that asshole art school student who's trying to fuck with the Hollywood guy, which I really was not. But that's what happened.

His answer was just silly on its face - you "didn't compromise," c'mon, bullshit, life is compromise. Of course there's compromise in art sometimes, especially where commerce intersects. And in terms of my question, supposing he understood it, it's a bullshit answer, too. It's not possible to tell the entire story of a man's life. You begin editing as soon as you open your mouth. Otherwise you'd be there forever.

As an example, I have just described an episode from my own life, the one in which I briefly intersected with James Mangold, Film Director. I have forgotten many details, including the exact wording of my question, his exact response, at what point I first thought he was a douchebag, whether I thought that going in, when all of this occurred, who I was with and why, and almost everything else. Yet I keep remembering the episode. If Mangold's next announced film, "Untitled James Mangold Project," is, like it sounds, the life story of one James Mangold, will this episode be included?

One Wise Latina

2009-07-14T14:59:00.000-07:00

Listening to some of the hearings on the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court, one marvels at a couple of things. First of all, this is a great country, with an extraordinary legal and political system. Secondly, this is a very strange, absurd and even ridiculous kind of theater. The purpose of these hearings is not clear to me.

It is well known that no nominee is going to say what she actually thinks about any issue that might come before the court, which is pretty much anything. Any time any such question is asked by the bloviators of the Judiciary Committee, who will do so at great length and with either trembling respect or barely concealed contempt, depending on their party affiliation, the nominee will parry by running through a list of important decisions by name while throwing in Latin terminology whenever possible, such as stare decisis and ex post facto, but without stating an opinion of any kind.

Nevertheless, the Senators keep on coming, trying to trip her up by getting her to admit that she has her own opinions and, in the meantime, testing her ability to recall specifics of potentially any high court case from our history. As theater it's unsatisfying because of its format: long-winded, self-serving, name-dropping questions followed by expert, extremely lawyerly equivocation, at once erudite, cautious and painfully dull. We can always hope for a Long Dong Silver surprise, but that's pretty unlikely.

As for Sotomayor's "wise Latina" comment, apart from the fact that it's just weird that our public figures are expected not to have any interesting thoughts or make any personal comments, ever, looking back over their entire lives, it just seems a particularly tiny straw to grab. If Clarence Thomas can sexually harass Anita Hill, pubic hairs and all, and get voted onto the Court, certainly Sonia Sotomayor can show some pride in her heritage and make a statement that pretty much anyone with the slightest poetic imagination would agree with, or at least understand in its context.

Madoff sentenced to hell

2009-06-29T12:39:00.000-07:00

Or maybe not quite hell - Bernie Madoff got 150 years today - but if hell had been an option, I'm sure that most people would have cheered such a sentence. Or, perhaps, like Prometheus, he could have been chained to a rock at the end of the world for a few thousand years with his guts eaten out of him every day by vultures, only to be replaced overnight so the punishment could begin anew each day. Would that have brought the money back?

Madoff is clearly a world-class asshole. I have a hard time understanding how he could have even perpetrated such a collosal swindle without being some kind of psychopath, in a certified, DSM-IV kind of way. What he did was despicable and disgusting, an infliction of suffering if not, as Judge Chin would have it, "extraordinarily evil," than at least ordinarily evil.

But I wonder, what is the price of freedom? I mean freedom in the sense of not being in prison. Can we put a price tag on the workaday freedom that we all take for granted? Being able to go outside, walk to the store, see a movie, make love to our wife, go to the library, call friends on the phone, have a beer, work? What is that worth?

Well, if Bernie's scam was worth $65 billion, and he got 150 years, the cost of freedom in the United States in 2009 is $1,187,214.61 per day.

Maybe that kind of reckoning doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but it makes about as much sense, to me, as someone getting 150 years in prison - for any crime. That's supposed to make us feel better? That he won't even be up for parole until he's been dead for a hundred years?

We're told that this sentence, which was the harshest possible under the law, will deter other fraudsters. What a load of horseshit. Like I said, Madoff is probably a psychopath. What deters such a person from anything? This sentence is ridiculous mob-justice, period. What happened to life in prison, which is what this sentence is, of course?

Or what happened to letting the punishment fit the crime? Why not send Bernie to jail for a while, take every last penny from him (mostly already done, or underway) and everyone who benefited from his fraud and pay back as much of the money as possible. Then, let him out of prison and give him an electronic bracelet, a shitty apartment and a shittier job, perhaps something that involves actually working with, and having to touch, shit. When did the answer to every conceivable crime in this country become lock them up for ever!

The United States has the highest documented prison population in the world. Not per capita; the highest in raw numbers! China ranks second - and they have a population of 1.3 billion people. We need prison reform in our country, desperately; our habit of locking people up is a sad legacy, especially given our stated values as a nation and as a people.

It does not need to be this way in order to teach people like Bernie Madoff a lesson. Let's use some common sense. And while we're on the subject - I said what he did was terrible, even evil - but people might also want to consider that something that looks too good to be true, like double digit returns on investment for years at a time, probably is! I am not blaming the victims for Madoff's scam, but his fraud certainly does not seem to have been particularly sophisticated. It was garden variety bullshit and people just spread it around and spread it around for twenty years.

Insanely greedy bastards who rob people need to be punished. Doing so is also a fine opportunity to consider the ways in which greed blinds us all.

Whatever Works

2009-06-27T13:52:00.000-07:00

According to the IMDb, Whatever Works is Woody Allen's 44th film as a director, if we include a couple of TV movies and segments from TV specials. His first such credit was What's Up, Tiger Lily? in 1966. By any reckoning this is a stunning achievement, and Allen as compulsively prolific an American filmmaker as any who has ever lived, save only the earliest Hollywood filmmakers, who churned out dozens of films a year in the silent era (though these were shorts) and managed multiple features each year under the studio system. These days, the most respected filmmakers in the world are lucky to put out a film ever three years or so - and if they manage that, they will probably spend the next couple years resting.

This is strikingly true of the younger generation of established American independents, like Spike Jonze, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson and their ilk, who have taken years and years between films. A newer crop of filmmakers has come along in the meantime, among them Kelly Reichardt and Ramin Bahrani, who seem to need less time, thankfully. Still no one (in America) approaches Woody Allen in terms of speed and efficiency of production, not even Clint Eastwood and Steven Spielberg who have both, on occasion, managed to release two films in one year (last year saw Eastwood's Changeling and Gran Torino) but have not kept up the one-movie-per-year pace for over 40 years like Allen.

I have seen every one of Woody Allen's theatrical films, most of them more than once, some of them many, many times. I have read mulitple books about Allen and by Allen. I am a fan, in the true sense of the word: I am fanatic about this filmmaker. He is one my idols, and I know more about him than any other artist. I see his films in the theater, each year, on the first day of their release.

I am not an apologist for Woody Allen. I have a particular view of him and his work - I tend to think that he peaked, not in his conventional-wisdom 1970s heyday, nor in the midst of his extraordinary artistic exploration and expansion in the 1980s (1985's The Purple Rose of Cairo is his oft-stated personal favorite and it's easy to see why), but at the end of that period with 1992's acid and hilarious Husbands and Wives. I am, on the contrary, a tough critic of his work and certainly will not deny that late period Woody, for the most part, stinks.

Of course, lately, hopeful critics and fans have talked about a renaissance for the Woodman, beginning with 2005's London-lensed Match Point, a sexy thriller in a Claude Chabrol mode, of all things. Certainly, MP was an entertaining film but, for long time fans, it was also an obvious Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) remix, transplanted to London, with hot young stars, a bit of tennis and much less moral seriousness. That MP came after a decade of dispiriting decline, which included several contenders for Worst Woody Allen Film (Anything Else, anyone?), certainly helped its reception and it does seem to be an instance of Woody Allen, suddenly, caring about filmmaking again.

Last year, he released Vicky Cristina Barcelona, for my money his funniest and most charming film in at least a decade or more. It demonstrated that he can still be fresh and vibrant, if wholly unaware of what decade it is. Now we get Whatever Works, as stale, unfunny and sloppy a film as he has made.

Originally written for Zero Mostel, then moth-balled when Mostel died in September, 1977, Woody recently told Terry Gross on Fresh Air that he dusted off the script in a big hurry when he thought SAG might strike last year. (By the way, it was a fascinating interview, catnip for any critical fan, especially in how skillfully and disingenuously he dodged most of the more interesting questions about his art imitating his life.) The film feels exactly like this, as if he literally pulled the script out of an old filing cabinet and sent it with his assistant to Kinkos while he was driven to the set to begin shooting. Apart from one or two nods to 2009 (a Taliban reference here, an Obama reference there), the film feels decades out of touch.

Watching Larry David helplessly mugging, grinning and flailing in the Woody Allen role as one of the crankiest assholes ever to appear in a Woody Allen film, I kept imagining Zero Mostel in the part. Whatever Works might have worked in the 70s, with tighter, more imaginative direction, Mostel's sublime misanthropy, a half dozen rewrites, a daffy Diane Keaton in the role of the country bumpkin come to the big city, snappy editing, and somewhere to go storywise. In the version we have, Evan Rachel Wood is leggy, adorable and drowning, hopelessly undirected, as an insultingly stereotypical, but unbelievably, "stupid" southern girl. David, a comic whose one note rings perfectly on Curb Your Enthusiasm is an unlikable, unlikely "genius" whose broken-record hatred for humanity and existential gloom become instantly tiresome.

Naturally, these two, separated in age by forty years, get married after David rescues Wood from being the hottest homeless girl in New York, takes her in and half-heartedly does a Pygmalion on her (a perennial theme in Woody-world, done much better in Mighty Aphrodite). Wood can be a good actress, but I suspect she needs the firm hand of an involved director, not Woody's famously hands-off approach with actors. For seasoned actors, however, that approach almost always yields strong performances, and Patrica Clarkson makes the absolute most out of her ridiculously stereotypical Southern Baptist Blanche DuBois character, Wood's mother, who comes to New York to find her runaway daughter, only to be seduced by the city's art scene when her family album is mistaken for outsider art.

Other actors, like the normally wonderful Michael McKean are wasted in empty supporting roles and some, like Ed Begley, Jr., just seem miscast. Harris Savides, one of my favorite cinematographers, manages to bring some panache and some nice movement to Allen's otherwise lazy, distracted mise-en-scene - which feature of his films used to be among the more interesting in contemporary cinema. All in all, a disappointment, and a bigger one than usual. Let's hope his next film - another London-set number - swings him back the other way.

Michael Jackson is Dead at 50

2009-06-25T17:50:00.000-07:00

When I was a dorky kid in the 80's, I didn't really listen to a lot of popular music. There are many reasons for this, foremost among them that there was no one at home who had any interest in such things. Still, there were of course plenty of songs and artists who were inescapable in the culture. Only a handful of these were truly worth listening to, and almost none of them could claim the mantle of genius.

But Michael Jackson was different. He was a genius, a true king of pop, if not the only king. He didn't do it alone - we wouldn't have the brilliance of Off the Wall and the perfection of Thriller without Quincy Jones, for example - but it was his music, his words, his sound, his moves, his glove.

In spite of everything that happened since - as MJ got crazier and crazier and creepier and creepier, though I still don't believe he actually touched those kids - we have Thriller, the ultimate, get-off-your-hipster-ass dance album, a desert island disc for all time, and so much more. He gave us the greatest gift of all, an eternity of booty-shaking, pure pop joy. I dare you, put on Thriller and try not to move.

I, for one, am damn sorry you're gone, Mike. For all your insanity, the planet is poorer tonight. Thanks for the jams, baby!

SCOTUS rules 13 year old girl should not have been strip searched

2009-06-25T09:38:00.000-07:00

Yeah, so this school in Arizona thought it had the right to strip search a 13 year old girl, including searching her underwear, to look for...ibuprofen. Turns out, heh, that violated her Fourth Amendment rights. Says the NYT:

"Thursday’s ruling sends the case back to the lower courts to assess what damages, if any, should be paid by the school district. But, by a vote of 7 to 2, the Supreme Court held that the individual officials in the case should not be held liable, because 'clearly established law' at the time of the search did not show that it violated the Fourth Amendment."

Jesus, fine. Because adults definitely ought to rely on "clearly established law" rather than common sense when it comes to questions of "should we make this child take off her clothes while we look for Advil." On the main issue, the court ruled 8-1. Now who do you think was the dissenter?

Let's see...underage girl, strip search, underwear, stubbornly opposed to the "basic reasonableness" interpretation...ah! Thomas, of course. What is with that guy?

Wunderkammer

2009-06-23T15:00:00.000-07:00

This film is by a CalArts classmate, Andrea Pallaoro. Nice work, Andrea! It is, I'd have to say, highly in character.

Vacation movies

2009-06-23T12:05:00.000-07:00

While we were on vacation in Texas, Kim and I took advantage of the grandparents by slipping out a couple of times to go to the movies.

First, we saw Pixar's Up, in 3D, in San Antonio. I thought it was a lovely film, certainly worthy of the Pixar name, and a charming, unusual, original story until the final act. The first ten minutes of Up is probably the best storytelling we'll get at the movies this year, compact, funny and heartbreaking. Flawless, really. What comes after is truly entertaining and only at the end does the film become louder and rougher and a bit less imaginative, and more like all non-Pixar American animation.

Plus, they had these funky 3D glasses that you could keep if you like to collect junk. Which I do. Backing up a step, in case anyone is curious about why Pixar just keeps making one good movie after another (with the arguable exception of Cars), I revealed the key a moment ago. They tell original stories. Look around at the studio animation scene: is anyone else doing that? Their films also somehow manage to feel auteur-driven, in spite of the thousands that work on them, rather than made by committee. It's hard to understand how they have such balls, but god bless 'em!

Up is currently on track to be the biggest grossing film of the year, after Wall Street analysts initally thought it might do poorly because the story and characters are a little unusual (the star is a grumpy old man) and there isn't the merchandizing potential of, say, Cars or Toy Story. As Bill the Cat would say, THPTH!

Secondly, we saw Sam Raimi's deliriously entertaining horror film, Drag Me to Hell. I suppose I should say, deliriously entertaining for a horror film. Occasionally I have participated in marketing surveys that ask which types of movies I like best, with the option to select from a big list of genres. This always baffles me, because I like any film as long as it's good. (In an earlier post, I describe what I mean by "good.") I see very few horror films because my perception is that almost every single one is a piece of shit. I need to be told to see one, like when my friends recommended the movie, The Descent, a solid example of the form on its better end.

Raimi, of course, has already made a couple of deliriously entertaining horror films and, no, DMTH is no Evil Dead. But it couldn't have been because he had way more money this time and Raimi's humor and perfect timing are intact from those days of yore, so it was great fun to see him cut loose. He's also just a terrific B-movie filmmaker, no matter the budget - I mean, if the Spiderman films are not B-movies, what is these days? The theater where we saw the movie, unfortunately, had the volume up to 11 which is hurting my ears even now, so that was a shame. But the movie was propulsive, disgusting, hilarious, timely, creaky and scary in all the right places, and it ended with a bang.

I admit to some mild disappointment, along with my wife, who pointed out that the heroine of the film, played by the hot but somewhat uninteresting Alison Lohman (whose blandness, nevertheless, works really well here), has very little agency throughout the film. She never actually does anything, until the very end, which one could not say about, say, Ash. She merely reacts to events and allows herself to be pushed and pulled around by every man she knows. A pretty, passive heroine, which, for me is a mixed bag. One does not much like her character or care very much about what happens to her, a bold and interesting choice. In other words, you almost root for the evil gypsy spirit to win which, I think, is really how these films ought to work.

In looking up a couple of things on IMDb for this post, I noticed that one of Raimi's next films is The Evil Dead! Apparently, Ghost House Pictures is trying to remake the original film for some reason. Raimi seems to be into it, for some reason. There's going to be a new director. It's not going to be Evil Dead 4. Whatever. Raimi already remade Evil Dead, calling it Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn. The whole ED saga is already completely self-referential and meta. So this remake idea is pretty darn stupid. Oh, well.

Shells

2009-06-23T11:50:00.000-07:00

We spent a couple of weeks in Texas recently, in San Antonio and on the gulf coast near Corpus Christi. If you're ever in that area, I recommend Shells, a restaurant in Port Aransas, a small beach town. It's a small place, probably with a bit of a wait on weekends and holidays, and might be tough for a larger group at any time, but if you're a couple escaping together for dinner while grandma watches your infant, say, it's pretty ideal.

I had a smoked rack of pork that was, no joke, one of the finest pieces of meat I have ever had in my life. As soon as I began to eat it, I was sad that soon I would be finished eating it. I probably slightly disturbed our waitress by informing her that it was so good, I wished I had a time machine so I could go back in time and have her bring it to me again. Later I realized that what I really wanted was to become unstuck in time, like Billy Pilgrim, and loop for a while during the meal, so I could just eat it again and again and again.

North Village

2009-06-22T22:12:00.000-07:00

Here, the Alameda Bike Posse encounters North Village, an abandoned Coast Guard housing complex. Surely, it is the future site of the zombie apocalypse.

Loyal readers will remember the site from an earlier post...

Finally, an end to music piracy!

2009-06-22T14:46:00.000-07:00

Now that the latest trial of international digital music thief, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, has ended with a fine of $1.92 million levied against the Brainerd, Minnesota, mother of four, for having offered 24 songs for free download on the Kazaa file-sharing service, I must express some relief that digital "piracy" has finally been stopped once and for all! I have lost so much sleep over the last decade on behalf of the noble corporations that produce our music and other popular entertainment, just thinking about the sadness and sense of helplessness they must have felt as they've watched themselves get robbed again and again by their own "fans."

Real fans--for these despicable scofflaws do not deserve that name--know that the only morally correct way to consume media is to do so in exactly the way the giant media corporations tell us to. So if we have to pay $18 for a new CD of mostly filler from a mediocre band that cost perhaps $6 to actually make, so be it. Or if we have to keep buying the movies, music and television shows that we have already bought each time a new format is introduced, well, of course we'll do it. It's only fair.

We are here--the fans, the real fans--to prop up the old business models for as long as necessary--maybe forever! Consumers, after all, are not the leaders in the marketplace. Just because we have the capability and the technology to consume media the way we want to when we want to, there's no way we should do so until the corporations have given us permission. It's so cool of them that they are slowly beginning to do so, too! Now a lot of music can be bought on the iTunes store--movies, too! Of course, these files can't be given away, swapped, shared or remixed in the same way that, say, a CD could have been, but that's probably for the best--I mean, I'm sure that the corporations have the best interests of their fans at heart. If they think I don't really need to be able to copy and remix a digital movie--or that I should pay more for that ability--well, surely, they know best, right?

I do, I do trust them--the media corporations and their consortiums, like the RIAA--and I just know that they all do business fairly, with integrity, and without a whiff of greed. I mean, if they didn't--perish the thought--the people just wouldn't stand for it, would they?

Twenty Years Ago in China

2009-06-04T09:14:00.000-07:00

"Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." Thomas Jefferson

China can shut off the Internet, crowd the square with P.L.A. thugs, jail dissidents and oppress and murder its own people, but the courage of the man in the picture above is eternal. His act of quiet resistance will last forever and, one day, he will be a hero to all the people of China, who will know his name and his story, as he is to all the rest of the world.

The School Board Meeting

2009-05-27T12:24:00.000-07:00

Last night, the board of the Alameda Unified School District finally voted on whether to adopt a controversial addition to its anti-bullying curriculum. "Lesson 9" adds some vocabulary, reading material and teaching guidelines for explaining to K-5 students that LGBT families are families, too, and that kids should not be teased because they have two mommies or two daddies. One might ask why an anti-bullying curriculum exists in the first place and whether it has replaced, say, spelling, but that ship sailed a long, long time ago.

The superintendent recommended that the board adopt the new lesson as part of the curriculum at the request of teachers who wanted some guidance and common ground in nixing playground bullying in which children call others "gay" or "fag." Teachers already felt comfortable addressing bullying on the basis of other protected class status, such as race or religion, but needed some backup in talking about sexual orientation issues. To me, this makes perfect sense. A generation from now, our culture will be able to honestly address prejudice based on sexual orientation but, as the community reaction has made clear, these days homosexuality is still tough to talk about for some reason.

That community reaction has been splashed across the pages of the local newspapers and barely contained in several hearings leading up to last night's vote. Although I did not attend those sessions, I decided to go to the board meeting last night to see what would happen. It was painfully boring, but still somehow an interesting process to have seen for myself.

Naturally, before any discussion of the issue that had packed the board chamber at City Hall to overflowing, there was an hour's worth of tedious agenda items to get through. Middle schoolers presented slide shows, student board members were recognized, reports were given, all while the polite attendees waited for the promised vote. Each side was to have 15 minutes to sum up its arguments; just as this process was to begin, the cops kicked out a random group of attendees into the overflow room, including yours truly, due to the concerns of the fire marshall, that iconic civic spoilsport.

We went quietly and remained quieter yet as we strained to hear the speakers' messages, garbled over CCTV. The overflow room seemed about 1/3 pro-curriculum and 2/3 Muslim, which for some reason meant monolithically anti-curriculum. A couple of the men carried signs that said "Alameda Muslims against LGBT," about which I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and interpret to mean "against the LGBT curriculum," which they've simply made slightly pithier by omission. That's what that means, right?

The opposition spoke first. A Muslim woman spoke about the bullying and teasing endured by Muslim girls in the public schools of Alameda when they wear the hijab. She told of one little girl who was particularly tormented by a classmate, who kept pulling her headscarf, and about how some of the parents in the local Muslim community don't feel comfortable enough with English to know what to do about this treatment. And therefore, she concluded, the board should vote down the curriculum.

Just to sum up that brilliant argument, because Muslim students in Alameda schools are sometimes unfortunately bullied because of their observation of their religious beliefs, gay students or students from gay-parent families should not have a curriculum that addresses anti-gay bullying problems. Huh? Wait, maybe I can translate this one: because your lifestyle is an abomination according to my religious beliefs, and your proposed curriculum does not specifically address my children, or respect my desire to teach my children religious intolerance and bigotry, fuck you.

This was more or less the message of a black pastor who spoke for the opposition, too. The other speaker was a lawyer who essentially said that if the school board passed this curriculum, a bunch of angry parents were going to sue the bejesus out of the already cash-strapped district for not providing an opt-out provision, allowing parents to protect their children from having to have this horrible lesson of peace and tolerance. Another wonderfully American way of saying Fuck You.

So, I'm not against the fuck you, if people would just sack up and say what they mean. How refreshing would it be for someone to say, "Yes, I am a bigot, that is my right, and it is my right to teach bigotry to my children, because that's the way Jesus or Mohammed or who-fucking-ever would have wanted it, so suck on that!" The Muslim woman claimed that the kids in her religious community would be forced to admit their prejudices during the lessons about how it's OK for Billy to have two mommies, which would subject them to even more bullying.

This is an interesting point and I won't dismiss it out of hand. Naturally, it is a legitimate concern for members of conservative religious communities that their children be treated fairly and with sensitivity in the public schools. No one who is not an asshole would dispute this. I am kind of an asshole, and I do not dispute it. In fact, I believe this kind of pluralistic fair treatment to be the very cornerstone of American democracy.

Which is why the woman's point of view and, apparently, that of many other members of her community, not to mention many others in the larger Alameda community, is so abhorrent to me: it violates that basic tenet of our democracy. How dare you make a point of demanding fair treatment for your own children while turning around and denying equal treatment to someone else's child?

One might reasonably argue that, by not including other protected classes in the curriculum, the board itself is guilty of this behavior. Reasonably, that is, until you actually look into why Lesson 9 came about in the first place, think about it for a hot second, and stop being a fucking idiot. Teachers felt that they had the tools and vocabulary necessary to make religious and racial tolerance a key aspect of the anti-bullying curriculum already, because those kinds of prejudice are so well known, understood and relatively easy to counter and teach about. What they lacked was a common sense, age-appropriate way to extend the discussion to cover a type of bullying that, by their own report, is becoming more and more common: anti-gay bullying.

Next, the pro-curriculum crowd spoke. Some of their speeches were good, some were classic East Bay hippie-dippy BS. The best was when this dorky 16-year-old hesher kid got up to talk about how he had been bullied for being gay, and how he liked fantasy and heavy metal. He was my hero of the night.

Before voting, the school board members grilled the teachers who had developed the curriculum, or who had been chosen to rep the curriculum, anyway, for what seemed like an eternity of bloviating self-love. Some people started to leave, so I was able to get back into the main chamber for the remainder of the evening. It was here that I had my one personal conflict of the night.

One of the board members, attempting to clarify something, or perhaps just being an ass, asked whether the curriculum would send the message to conservative religious kids that their parents' beliefs about homosexuality were wrong. The pro-curriculum part of the room reacted with a collective No! and I said, sotto voce, "Even though they are." This snide comment, heard by almost no one, caused a laugh-snort from the woman directly in front me and the head of the man sitting next to me to whiplash in my direction. He said, "No more than you," in a mildly shocked and offended voice, and that was it.

This was the most interesting moment of the evening for me because it led me to think about my own intolerance. After all, if I interpret him correctly, he makes an interesting philosophical point. If I would dispute religions claims as false I can, in the end, have no more proof for my point of view than the religious person, therefore I cannot be any more assured of the correctness of my view than I can of the incorrectness of that person's view.

Fair enough, philosophically and logically sound (I am not like the modern atheist whose insistence that logic demands his faithlessness is, in the end, an act of faith) -- but totally irrelevent! You are free to believe whatever you will and to raise your children in your system of belief, to teach them that homosexuality is a sin or that jews are evil or black people shifty. Your freedom to do so is another foundational American right, that I will always defend.

But our public institutions must be agnostic, BY LAW. They must, BY LAW, be equally accesible. They cannot teach one religion or even two or three or four religions as "correct." Sometimes these institutions will come into conflict with people's beliefs. That is the price we pay for living in the United States of America, that we must live with other people whose views differ and be tolerant of their right to profess those beliefs.

I am a tolerant person in that direction: you have the right to believe whatever you want, no matter how foolish or even idiotic I may find your belief system to be. Even if it's wrong! But you will not, cannot, force other people to abide by your belief system in the public sphere. This is the direction in which I am intolerant. I do not tolerate bigotry, demogoguery, lies. I do not tolerate stupidity and prejudice. If that's your religion, keep it in your home, your house of worship and share the public space. But if you want to force your beliefs on me at the expense of justice and equality for all, fuck you.

The curriculum passed, on a vote of 3-2.

A Month of Oscar

2009-05-18T14:40:00.001-07:00

And no blogging. I will get back to it, back to life, back to whatever is normal for me now. The new normal. Normal wasn't normal for me before he was born - I'm actually used to having a job or at least an occupation - so who knows what normal will be now. What I know is that this economy sucks, that rich, greedy assholes fucked it up for everyone, that George Bush is especially to blame, that most politicians aren't much better. What I know is that I love my son and the rest of it matters very little.

Waves of visitors, relatives, food, little sleep, movies on the couch, board games, a crying, pooping, sleeping, bright-eyed baby boy. More baby clothes than even a baby needs. Thrush. A little more awareness, a few more smiles, every day. Bopo, Oz, the Flying Burrito. A sleepy blur of time.

My bologna has a first name...

2009-04-20T15:11:00.000-07:00

...it's O-S-C-A-R!

Important Court Case

2009-04-13T19:12:00.000-07:00

Finally, these guys are getting their day in court!

I do think the fashion in question is incredibly stupid-looking. But to make it illegal? Ah, the American funhouse...

Wendy and Lucy

2009-04-09T18:16:00.000-07:00

Kelly Reichardt's third film is Wendy and Lucy, in which Michelle Williams' down-and-out hipster, Wendy, searches for the director's dog, Lucy. In KR's previous film, Old Joy--not to be confused with Oldboy--I thought Lucy's performance edged out that film's leads, but here Williams holds her own.

And more so. This is a superb film and it's built around Williams like a little cabin in the redwoods. It seems somehow cozy and expansive, though there's nothing cozy about the futility, the darkness, knawing at the edges of this simple story. I'm not the first to be struck by its similarity to Carver, though it's actually based on a story by Jonathan Raymond.

I was impressed with the rigor and beauty of Old Joy, but ultimately didn't have enough curiousity about the characters to sustain the narrative minimalism. Here it was different. In Carver's best work, his effects come across in how the reader constructs the spaces between what he's given us and tries to resolve what he's denied us. Reichardt, too, allows us to know very little for sure about our heroine (that is to say, Wendy). She's "passing through," she's estranged from her family, she's counting her last hundreds in her drive across country, hoping to make it to the canneries of Alaska. Her golden retriever mix, Lucy, is pretty much all she has.

But we don't get cheap clues or clumsy exposition or voice-over or flashbacks or really anything more to help us fill in any other facts of Wendy's life. Rail-thin, she's largely desexualized in her hipster boy-clothes and cropped haircut, unless you like that sort of thing. She's still rather stunning, of course, because it's a movie and she's Michelle Williams. For that reason and because she's so down-and-out, she has our sympathy from the beginning.

And she continues to have it, for the most part, but throughout the film--and days later, it seems--many questions spin out from her circumstances, even as they deteroriate. It's a wonder to be watching a film that depends on you to help construct what you're seeing and doesn't simply spoon feed you. Wendy and Lucy, in its still, quiet way, constantly asks you to respond. What would you do in her shoes? Would you help her? How did she get here? What's the right move? How did she screw her life up like this? How far away from this am I? Your sympathies shift moment to moment as you scrutinize her more and more closely.

The film encourages--demands, really--a deep, close reading. Like Gus Van Sant's best work, Wendy and Lucy cannot merely be watched. To do so, frankly, is to risk boredom--it would be like watching someone else play a game. These films are meant to be engaged with, stepped into, like Mia Farrow in The Purple Rose of Cairo.

Lucy the dog, by the way, is a remarkable screen performer. She was such a good doggie in Old Joy that she upstaged pretty much that whole movie by her very...well, joy, actually. Hmm, I think I've just realized something. Anyway, her long absence in the new film lends the story its dread, touching on, in its neo-realist way, the Northwest Gothic dread of Twin Peaks, the dark whistling pines at the forest's edge a metaphor for the unspeakable state of nature beyond.

We fear for Wendy that, though things look bad now, they may get much worse just down the road.

As usual, Jon says it best

2009-04-09T18:08:00.000-07:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

Baracknophobia - Obey

thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Economic Crisis

Political Humor

Vermont and the National Organization for Marriage

2009-04-09T17:08:00.000-07:00

Following closely on the heels of my last post, Vermont has now legalized same-sex marriage. Thanks to last year's political campaigns, I am on way too many liberal email lists for having signed this or that petition, or maybe even giving money somewhere along the line. So I get mail the other day, warning me about the existence of this video:

I only post this video because I don't think anyone viewing it on my blog is going to take to the streets in opposition of gay marriage from having seen it. It's pretty hilariously stupid. What I think about when I see this kind of bullshit is about the poor actors in the video. I mean, do they believe what they're shilling? or are they just whores, AKA desperate actors?

I frequently wonder myself whether I could make a commercial for an organization as detestable as this one. Some days I try to embrace the kind of hard-partying, hedonistic, omnivorous self-interest I admired so much in some of my old-school libertarian conservative buddies in college (looking at you, Lewis). Other days I can't muster the requisite self-loathing.

But if you start rejecting work on the basis of moral outrage and contempt for idiocy, how quickly your opportunities as an actor dry up.

And then there's the issue of Damon "Rainbow Coalition" Owens. Who is Damon Owens? For those of you who clicked through and actually read the linked article, I mean, holy shit: Opus Dei? That got weird pretty fast.

The capper for me is that this organization uses the acronym NOM, which was my acronym. Bummer. Thankfully, I don't think it's gonna catch on.

There's small print in the video as the "California doctor" comes on to tell her story of religious persecution at the creamy-smooth hands of the gays, which says, "The stories these actors are telling are based on real incidents. Find out more at www.nationformarriage.org" I note the lack of trailing period there, which I take to be a sign of anxiety. Will the kids find our website as easily as they can be recruited by Harvey Milk?

Won't someone please think of the children?

Really Proud of Iowa Today

2009-04-03T14:54:00.000-07:00

Word comes today that the Iowa Supreme Court has overturned the state ban on gay marriage, making it the first Midwestern state to legalize the practice. This makes me proud, because I am a former Iowan. When I was in high school in Ottumwa, Iowa, I was one of the so-called "drama fags," for my participation in school plays, and I also got called a fag for wearing Birkenstocks to school a few years before they were cool. Thinking about that second example, well, I can kinda forgive it. I mean, I still think "fag" is a funny word - what I mean by that is it still has the capacity to sound transgressive in our absurdly P.C. world, which few words any longer can. When someone like Cartman says it, it's going to be funny, like it or not. And, you know, it's funny when you say it to your friends. Sorry.

I remember that I was putting up a poster for my literary magazine, Chautauqua, in the school cafeteria during study hall. There was a group of...what? Redneck heshers? I had moved to Iowa in 8th grade from Maryland and, even by the end of high school, I still thought of those folks as just Iowans. But redneck heshers works. So, there was a little gang of them nearby and they sent over one of their groupies to ask me if I was a "fag." I followed her back to the table to tell her boyfriends that if they had wanted to ask me out, they could just have done so. They didn't need to send their girl over to do it for them. They could not think of any clever responses, so I think they just told me to fuck off.

Here's the best part of the ruling, apart from that it's another repudiation of prejudice on the part of the courts and apart from that it allows gays and lesbians to get married:

"Same-sex marriages will be permitted in Iowa for at least two years, because the legislative process required to overturn the ruling would take that long. A constitutional amendment would require the state legislature to approve a ban on same-sex marriage in two consecutive sessions after which voters would have a chance to weigh in. Despite opposition to the ruling by Republican lawmakers, Democrats, who control the legislature, have given no indication that they intend to introduce such an amendment." (Davey & Robbins, NYT)

So the Mormons are going to have wait two years to force their bigotry on Iowans. Ha! Take that, Latter Day Dicks!

Watching the Fire

2009-03-31T16:40:00.000-07:00

An abandoned military hospital, as many local reports termed it, burned over the weekend not far from Alameda Point. Scott and I took a long bike ride Sunday, the first part of which consisted of following, then getting away from, the noxious smoke. We circled around and got pretty close to the fire by riding into this weird ghost town on the west end. I think it's former Coast Guard housing and obviously the future site of the zombie apocalypse.

True Sick

2009-03-27T12:02:00.000-07:00

Kutiman, mashing up YouTube, via Virginia Heffernan. True sick brilliance.

Eastbound & Down

2009-03-24T15:24:00.000-07:00

The meteoric ascension of Danny McBride continues, after The Foot Fist Way, Tropic Thunder and Pineapple Express, in HBO's "Eastbound & Down." McBride's redneck comic persona is similar to Will Ferrell's arrogant idiot with more desperation and a harder edge. Surely this affinity is what drew Ferrell and his comedy partner, Adam McKay, to McBride in Foot Fist, which they shepherded to festival slots and distribution and more or less franchised in this new series, which just ended its six-episode first season run.

In Foot Fist, McBride was an unlikely children's martial arts instructor, dreaming of the big time; in "Eastbound & Down," he's a washed-up big league pitcher forced to return to his southern hometown and become a P.E. coach at the local middle school. The superficial attraction of the series is watching McBride's Kenny Powers, with his shockingly filthy mouth and stadium-sized ego, contend with the diminishment of his life and prospects back home. If you liked Foot Fist and McBride's memorable character in Pineapple, you'll love "Eastbound & Down."

Not all critics do, nor will all audiences, but there is a lot more to this series, as it turns out, that has made the first season such a pleasure. Not just Will Ferrell's recurring character or the talented supporting cast but an unexpected groundedness in real life makes the series something special. What's more, episodes 2-4 were directed by David Gordon Green, one of the best American filmmakers of his generation. Green directed Pineapple Express, but prior to that he was known for deeply-felt portraits of the decaying south, like George Washington and the heartbreakingly romantic All the Real Girls, a work of stunning naturalism and beauty (McBride has a small part in that one, too).

Green's skill and native southern sensibility, sympathy and rhythm lends his episodes, especially, a poetic lyricism amidst the raw humor, boobies and bad behavior. McBride's characters, notably in his work with Foot Fist director and series co-creator, Jody Hill (along with Ben Best), have hinted all along at a greater soulfulness we don't much get to see, obscured as it is by his super-loser antics. Here it's starting to shine through.

Spring begins in Sunol Regional Wilderness

2009-03-23T19:04:00.000-07:00

The East Bay Regional Park District has a lot to offer. 65 parks, 98,000 acres, 1,150 miles of trails. I've enjoyed hiking in many of them over the years. I even shot my first film in one of them. On Friday, the first day of spring, Kim and I discovered a new one, the Sunol Regional Wilderness.

This is the perfect time of year to explore these parks, while the round, grassy hills are still an iridescent green under deep blue skies, slopes busting out with wildflowers, creeks and streams full of water, sun not too hot, a light, cool breeze blowing by late afternoon. We took the Canyon View Trail because the brochure promised a "gentle rise in elevation" and we needed a mild walk rather than a strenuous hike, as the pictures suggest.

The trees, trail, flowers and hill views were lovely enough, but the gem of the park was the rocky canyon on the Alameda Creek called Little Yosemite. We plan to return during the summer and try to sneak a dip, though the water will likely be reduced to a trickle by then. It'll still be worth the trip...
"Little Yosemite"

By the banks of the Alameda Creek.
On the way out, Flag Hill.

The Head of the Sinaloa Cartel is the New Drug War Billionaire

2009-03-12T14:20:00.001-07:00

Following up from yesterday's post, about how our "War on Drugs" amounts to flushing tens of billions of taxpayer dollars down the toilet, where they are washed out to sea and turned into terns' nests, for which the terns are, no doubt, grateful, but which could probably be done more cheaply if tern-nest creation is our only goal, comes news today that Joaquin Guzman has made it onto Forbes' new billionaire's list.

Who's Guzman? Only the most wanted man in Mexico, a murderous drug kingpin, "one of the biggest providers of cocaine to the United States," according to Forbes' senior editor, Luisa Kroll.

From the AP: "Forbes said Mexican and Colombian traffickers laundered between $18 billion and $39 billion in proceeds from wholesale drugs shipments to the United States in 2008."

So how do you stop a criminal capitalist? The same way you stop any capitalist: gunships. No, wait, I mean, not gunships...what's it called? Oh, yeah: more capitalism! Legalization, Taxation, Regulation, Treatment = bye-bye cartels!

Legalize It All

2009-03-11T16:05:00.000-07:00

The Economist has published an excellent editorial in favor of complete legalization of drugs, found via BoingBoing. Here's hoping that other mainstream publications will follow up. It's one thing for a bunch of pot smokers to clamor for decriminalization; it's another for a sober, moderate, highly-respected news magazine to advocate wholesale, international legalization of all drugs.

It's a matter of honesty and the lesser of two evils. Honestly, the "War on Drugs," waged in one form or another for the past century, has been a complete failure by any possible measure. Sure, drug use in rich countries fluctuates over time; meanwhile, the human cost in poor countries rises ever higher. This will never end. The lesser of two evils would be legalization, taxation, regulation and treatment.

I find it strange that this is such a political hot-potato in the U.S. Most politicians cannot talk about it and journalists won't write about it. We are a deeply hypocritical people in certain ways. We claim to want justice, yet we lock up 1 in 5 of our black men. We think (some) drugs should be illegal to protect our children and communities, even if thousands of innocent Mexicans are slaughtered as a result of our drug war. Our new President aims to keep fighting that war, even though he used to snort coke. He likely still enjoys a cigarette from time to time; nicotine, though legal, is as addictive as the hardest drugs.

This hypocrisy is not merely tiresome and idiotic, it is far more dangerous than any drug.

Who watches Watchmen?

2009-03-07T13:02:00.000-08:00

The long-awaited comic book adaptation, Watchmen, finally hit screens this weekend. I don't remember when I first read the graphic novel, but that is an experience no one should miss for its density, brilliance and humanity. The book is often cited as the greatest comic of all time; I'm not enough of a buff to dispute or validate this, but if there is a better one, I'd sure love to read it.

Watchmen has a long, troubled history in Hollywood; its own author, Alan Moore, along with many readers, claimed it could not be filmed (and Moore famously removed his name from this version). Zack Snyder has proved them wrong, in the literal sense at least. I was never one of those readers who thought it could not be filmed, but I have long thought it somewhat redundant to do so. After all, there is no rule that says every single comic must become a movie. Watchmen, in particular, was perfectly conceived as a comic book - some comics, just like some popular novels, seem to be written almost in anticipation of the eventual film adaptation, but not this one. The greatest aspects of the book are those that would also make it most difficult to adapt: its dense, multi-threaded storyline, its long list of characters both in the 1985 "present" of the story and in its rich historical digressions, its philosophical musings, its cynicism and melancholy.

Nevertheless, I was pleased to lower my expectations and disregard the predictable critical onslaught of the last few days as the reviews began to appear, because I just wanted to see this great story on the big screen. For awhile, that was more than enough to satisfy me, right through the second act. A great story that you love, no matter how flawed the adaptation might turn out to be, can often be great fun to watch just to see the filmmakers' take on it. In this case, Snyder gets quite a bit right - for a fan of the graphic novel like myself, here it is, come to life.

I don't think the film could possibly make a lick of sense, though, to anyone who has not read the book - which ought to be enough to classify the enterprise as an expensive failure. This was a foregone conclusion, however; unless it had been made as a mini-series, there's no way the adaptation could have been both faithful and comprehensible to the uninitiated. I think that most of the critics who slammed the film have not read the book, which is not unreasonable, though I believe it contributed heavily to the level of snark (sounds like some people didn't get invited to join the club).

In my viewing, last night at 10:30 in the historic theater at the Alameda, I thought the biggest problem for the film was perhaps one that could never have been reconciled. The story is set in an alternate-universe 1985 in which Nixon is still president and the U.S. won the Vietnam war, thanks to the unstoppable powers of the giant, blue, atomic god-man, Dr. Manhattan. All of this is not nearly as difficult to swallow as our own knowledge of the radical changes the American perspective has undergone since the mid-1980s, when the comic was written. A couple of years later the Berlin Wall would fall, along with Soviet communism, leaving the U.S. as the world's lone superpower in a world where the notion of a superpower was already passe, robbing the story of its true backdrop, the spectre of nuclear annihilation in a quick and dirty World War III. Add in the optimistic boom of the 1990s and the further erosion of the nation-state as the seat of supreme power, borne out in the chaos of 9/11 and the Bush years, and you get a social, political, technological and psychological context almost unrecognizable to anyone under 30, and only a subject of misty nostalgia to anyone under 40. It's too late for Watchmen.

The narrative backdrop, therefore, acts as a kind of distancing mechanism, that is, the audience must make a number of intellectual steps prior to reaching a point of engagement with the film. We must accept the strange datedness of the material as a time capsule from the past that might yet have some relevance to our world today just as we must strive to avoid being distracted by the typically naked Dr. Manhattan's penis (and blue balls). There are also some missteps in the musical choices in the film and a generally on-the-nose literalism with those choices that takes us right out of the stream of things. These distractions mean Watchmen sometimes seems more like a museum piece than a movie, difficult to get swept up in.

A number of critics have mentioned the brutal, graphic violence as a serious flaw - but here's where they've got things really wrong. I think it might be a generational thing, or a problem for people without exposure to the comic book, but the violent action, especially around the Rorshach character, is one of the best elements here, often suddenly yanking the viewer back into an emotional engagement with the story after we've been allowed to drift away. Why we have come to accept the bloodless, inconsequential PG13 violence so common in our popular films I don't know, but the shocking brutality of man's inhumanity to man is very much a theme of the book and the film, even when both glory in it. This is one of the things Snyder does best.

Like I said, I was engaged enough with watching the great comic book unspool onscreen (not a glowing endorsement, mind you, but an acknowledgment of very low expectations somewhat exceeded) through the second act, but the final quarter of the film was interminable, muddled, cluttered and confusing. The truly unfilmable comic book ending (because it would have required too much explanation and might very well have looked super-ridiculous) was changed into drab monologuing, more slow-mo chopsocky, massive genocide and dumb rationalizing. Up to that point, though, there were some moments of real beauty, making me nostalgic for the real deal, the masterpiece that started all of this.

Local Developments in Fried Chicken

2009-03-07T12:47:00.000-08:00

The KFC at the corner of Encinal and Jackson Park, the deep-fried stank of which has long enshrouded the surrounding blocks, has been knocked down.

What will take its place, you ask? The construction company, helpfully, has hung a sign on the fence. This has left me both amused and dismayed, AKA dismused.

Matt Zoller Seitz on Kevin B. Lee

2009-03-06T13:03:00.000-08:00

Came upon a fine essay by critic and filmmaker Matt Zoller Seitz on The House Next Door blog, about more YouTube takedowns. This time, YouTube has apparently taken down critic Kevin B. Lee's entire archive of video essays because they make use of copyrighted film clips for the purpose of scholarly commentary. Rather than drone on about this myself, I'll just encourage anyone interested to read Seitz's essay.

OMG, UMG, WTF?

2009-03-05T11:59:00.000-08:00

Amidst ongoing reports of the Universal Music Group's abuse of YouTube's automated Content I.D. system, which uses a digital "fingerprint" to identify copyrighted content and remove it from YouTube without regard for Fair Use, comes an article in today's NYT, which begins thusly:

"Google's YouTube and the Universal Music Group, the world’s largest music label, are in advanced discussions over a licensing agreement that could lead to the creation of a premium site for music videos, according a person briefed on the talks."

The backstory here is that the sub-divisions of the sub-divisions of the media leviathans that control all the world's music, probably going back to our simian ancestors' rhythmic stick-banging, if they had their way, had worked out a way to accept uses of their music tracks in YouTubers' uploads, namely by running advertising against those videos on the YouTube site. This arrangement was worked out as a way for the labels to avoid looking like Super-Colossal/Special-Gigantic Dickheads for, say, taking down 30-second videos of toddlers dancing around to music by Prince (even though such a use is absolutely, unequivocally and obviously an instance of Fair Use, a legal principle neither the music labels nor the film and television studios appear to grasp, and not a violation of copyright in any way).

Except, apparently, UMG decided there wasn't enough money in this arrangement which, to be fair, would also have allowed potentially infringing uses to stay up and generate ad revenue. So now UMG has changed its policy to Automatic Takedown when the Content I.D. system finds one of its songs on YouTube. This has led to the usual indiscrimate corporate censorship, in which even uses of Universal content falling under Fair Use result in robot takedown with the added chilling effect that the victims are afraid to seek redress because they don't want to be sued by the Big Bad Wolf. Don't think this is happening? Well, here's an example:

This viral video, made by DustFilms, was a smash on YouTube until UMG took it down. Now it's a smash on Funny Or Die.

Take on Me: Literal Video Version - watch more funny videos

Parody has long been acknowledged as Fair Use - and it's not even one of those difficult-to-figure-out Fair Use cases. The US Supreme Court, in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., a landmark case, held unanimously that a parody that reproduces a substantial portion of a copyrighted work, even for profit, is still protected speech under the Fair Use clause of the 1976 Copyright Act. DustFilms' amusing series of "literal" music videos are clearly parodies. Case closed.

So, automated takedown or not, YouTube's removal of this video (and subsequent "literal music videos") at UMG's request is nothing less than illegal corporate supression of protected speech. The trouble is, when this kind of thing happens, no small-time artist has the financial ability to take on Universal's legal machine. This is where we are today with copyright in America. The corporations that control the vast majority of the intellectual property that makes up our popular culture - which many would suggest is the stuff of our collective consciousness as a people, and very much a subject for art and criticism - are rich enough to illegally cock-block anyone who dares to create that art or criticism.

I know this firsthand, after having worked at a smallish media corporation with a giantish fear of being sued for infringement and seeing the chilling effect, every single day, of that fear on the media we were trying to create. That's bad enough, but at least that company had a legal department and a world-famous top executive; hell, if we had gotten sued, we could have noisily fought back. Individual artists rarely have that chance.

Then today comes this news that UMG's new "solution" for this "problem" is to start a new "premium" website with YouTube for their music videos. Sigh. Just what we need, another fucking online video site.

I get that these old media companies are desperately trying to navigate the uncharted waters of the new media space - or rather, are desperately trying to ignore the long-existing charts because they don't like the lay of the land and hope to miracle some kind of Northwest Passage through it - and it's not easy to do. Nor is it easy for them to watch their old business models crumble all around them. I can sympathize with them, if I screw up my face and squeeze my eyes shut and clap really loud and believe in fairies, just a little bit.

Maybe this UMG/YT premium site will be the answer to old media's prayers. But if it incorporates the same censoring, restrictive, Big Brother-ish, anti-fan oafishness of their efforts so far, there's little chance of success.

Taken

2009-03-01T18:35:00.000-08:00

Felt like a movie this gloomy afternoon, so Scott and I headed to Taken at the Alameda Theatre. Currently the number 4 movie in America, the film is a gloriously preposterous ticking-clock Frantic revamp that swaps daughter for wife, Liam Neeson for Harrison Ford, Pierre Morel for Roman Polanski and Paris for...okay, Paris. It's about a one-time "government worker" (read: super-spy) whose formerly-estranged 17-year-old daughter gets abducted by Albanian sex-slavers while she's on a trip to Europe to - get this - follow U2 around on their summer tour. Of all the hilarious absurdity in this film, this last detail might be my favorite, were it not for the fact that U2 has a new album about to drop, making this sublimely ridiculous notion seem like mere product placement. (I mean, she may as well be going on tour with Bing Crosby, for all the relevance U2 has for the high school demographic.)

This set-up is simply an excuse, of course, for Neeson's snarling sadist to go all Jason Bourne on a bunch of thugs, or all Abu Ghraib on a sleazy kidnapper, depending on whether you read the film as a delightfully post-narrative exercise in mindlessly kinetic cinematic bone-crunching or a delightfully post-9/11 ironically enthusiastic argument for the Bush era's tough-love foreign policy. I chose to read it both ways, my delight intact. We laughed our way through the whole thing, both at the consistently risible plot devices and the genuinely pulse-quickening action.

Thankfully, the filmmakers do not take any of this seriously, which is the only reason why the film works (apart from Neeson's strong work) - an observation that I suspect will become a refrain for me if I continue to write about film. When a wholly preposterous film takes itself seriously I find it far more irritating than a trifle of a film that just wants to have fun and blow things up. Taken is a case of savvy filmmakers, with a decent sense of fun, having a lark and taking the audience along with them. It's a propulsive revenge flick with a pleasingly savage and unsympathetic hero and zero sentiment. It adds up to a fine time at the picture show - which is not to say that the film couldn't be a great deal better.

It would have been better if the daughter had been lying about following U2 around when in reality she just wanted to gallivant around Europe for the summer flirting with, and maybe fucking, a bunch of silly Euroboys.

It would have been better if Liam Neeson had spoken French when posing as a Parisian cop who, as far as I know, speak French. Filmgoers can take a minute or two of subtitles, for chrissake - it's not about authenticity, it's about making him appear like even more of a badass. He can kick the asses of twelve guys at once and speak French!

It also would have been better if the first act - in which we learn that Neeson has been estranged from his daughter, but is trying to connect again - had been, you know, cut. We don't care, and daughter Maggie Grace (of "Lost," my current TV obsession) sucks too much for us to care that we don't care. She is just a hottie MacGuffin, and the sooner those fuckers abduct her, the sooner Liam can kick much ass. Get on with it.

Finally, just a point of interest. I don't know whether it's our "post-9/11 world" or what, but, man, are Americans really this afraid to let their kids do anything? I get that daddy Liam is overprotective because he's a paranoid former spook who has seen all kinds of whatever, but the girl is 17 (although it's true that 25-year-old Grace's version of 17 makes her seem 13) and it doesn't seem entirely far-fetched that she could go to Europe and not get sold into sex-slavery. That is, the filmmakers do an especially weak job of convincing us that this all-important aspect is even possible - I know I just said that I wanted less exposition, and I'll stand by that, but I'm just surprised that the filmmakers thought they needed none about this part of the story.

Two notes: this is a PG13 film that really feels like an R. It's very violent, though there's almost no blood which is how they get away with it. I was convinced it was an R and that the chatty young boys in our aisle had snuck in (for which I applauded them, though we know how I feel about talking in the movies). Also, once again, the projection was substandard. I had to leave the film to ask the staff to correct the framing - the frame line was visible at the top of the screen as was a sliver of the bottom of the next frame. This is pure carelessness.

Salman slams Slumdog

2009-03-01T17:05:00.000-08:00

Salman Rushdie, writing in The Guardian:

"The problems begin with the work being adapted. Swarup's novel is a corny potboiler, with a plot that defies belief: a boy from the slums somehow manages to get on to the hit Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and answers all his questions correctly because the random accidents of his life have, in a series of outrageous coincidences, given him the information he needs, and are conveniently asked in the order that allows his flashbacks to occur in chronological sequence. This is a patently ridiculous conceit, the kind of fantasy writing that gives fantasy writing a bad name. It is a plot device faithfully preserved by the film-makers, and lies at the heart of the weirdly renamed Slumdog Millionaire. As a result the film, too, beggars belief.

It used to be the case that western movies about India were about blonde women arriving there to find, almost at once, a maharajah to fall in love with, the supply of such maharajahs being apparently endless and specially provided for English or American blondes; or they were about European women accusing non-maharajah Indians of rape, perhaps because they were so indignant at having being approached by a non-maharajah; or they were about dashing white men galloping about the colonies firing pistols and unsheathing sabres, to varying effect. Now that sort of exoticism has lost its appeal; people want, instead, enough grit and violence to convince themselves that what they are seeing is authentic; but it's still tourism. If the earlier films were raj tourism, maharajah-tourism, then we, today, have slum tourism instead. In an interview conducted at the Telluride film festival last autumn, Boyle, when asked why he had chosen a project so different from his usual material, answered that he had never been to India and knew nothing about it, so he thought this project was a great opportunity. Listening to him, I imagined an Indian film director making a movie about New York low-life and saying that he had done so because he knew nothing about New York and had indeed never been there. He would have been torn limb from limb by critical opinion. But for a first world director to say that about the third world is considered praiseworthy, an indication of his artistic daring. The double standards of post-colonial attitudes have not yet wholly faded away."

Finally. Thanks, S.R. Now, quick--duck!

Cigarettes and Movies

2009-02-27T14:12:00.000-08:00

Just read an NYT article about the ongoing campaign by the AMA to ban cigarettes from movies. Apparently, the PG13-rated film, He's Just Not That Into You, has some cigarettes in it but no smoking. There's also a sort of anti-smoking storyline in the film.

In the past couple of years, the AMA has been fighting to get Hollywood studios to eliminate any acknowledgment of the existence of cigarettes, or their use, from films, saying that smoking in films causes 200,000 teenagers to start smoking each year. The organization wants any film with smoking in it to get an R rating.

As someone who has recently quite smoking after 15 years of the habit, I recognize how dangerous smoking can be and how difficult it is to stop. It's a pretty stupid thing to do that, I admit, I probably saw as cool or fun or grown-up in part because of depictions of smoking in popular culture. When I smoked, seeing someone smoke in a film would often trigger a desire to have a cigarette myself - of course, this was once I was already a dedicated smoker.

But fuck the AMA. It offends me deeply when some organization or another works to ban something in pop culture as a means of social engineering. And evidently, as in this latest skirmish, you don't even have to have smoking in the film to warrant a rebuke, just cigarette packaging. In the article, Melissa Wathers of the AMA Alliance (apparently a domestic spying organization in which volunteers are asked to police films for violations) says, "There is absolutely zero artistic justification for this." And you are...who, exactly?

I haven't seen the film, but I would hazard a guess that there is little "artistic justification" for its entire existence. But that's the filmmakers business, as is whether or not they find a contextual need for cigarettes in the film. Quite possibly the AMA could find some better things to do with its time.

Very few discerning people

2009-02-27T11:13:00.000-08:00

The Oscars

2009-02-25T10:58:00.000-08:00

The 81st Academy Awards were held the other night and I've barely thought about them since, though I'm sure that's not so for Danny Boyle. Scott had an Oscar party, which was fun, though I always feel bad when people are enthusiastic about films that I really dislike. Makes me feel like a dick. And it's weird, because it's the opposite with my film school buddies - they hate everything and say that I LOVE everything.

Anyway, some parts of the show were really hilarious - like Hugh Jackman's opening song-and-dance routine. I love how he's such a classic Broadway entertainer type-guy and also Wolverine. The best bit was the part about The Reader. The Pineapple Express skit was also a highlight of the evening:

Dustin Lance Black's speech, when he won for the Milk screenplay, was really moving. And I was glad to see Penn win again, also for Milk, which should have won Best Picture, though I would have applauded a Mickey Rourke win, too.

Seeing Black and Penn win reminded me of an Op-Ed in the NYT that day. It was co-authored by two writers on opposite sides of the gay marriage issue and proposes the compromise of federally-recognized civil unions without forcing religious groups to recognize those marriages. In other words, give gays and lesbians the right to marry by another name, with most of the same rights as straight people, but if one of these gays or lesbians happens to be a church secretary, allow that church not to extend benefits to the partner if they don't want to - much the way Catholic hospitals are not forced to perform abortions.

"In the case of gay marriage, a scorched-earth debate, pitting what some regard as nonnegotiable religious freedom against what others regard as a nonnegotiable human right, would do great harm to our civil society. When a reasonable accommodation on a tough issue seems possible, both sides should have the courage to explore it."

This is a good point, worth considering, but I don't think "separate-but-equal" works, does it? The issue is not about whether churches would actually have to marry gays and lesbians - they will never have to do so, if they don't want to, because of the First Amendment. And if religious organizations want to be able to discriminate against whomever in terms of benefits and whatnot for employees, well I think that's probably also protected, if super-dickish. I mean, we allow people to be dickheads in all kinds of ways in our society.

But I fail to see how this adds up to no federal protection for gay marriage. Carve out exceptions for churches, fine, but civil law is civil law. Full marriage rights should be available to all adult couples, right now.

The New Guy

2009-02-25T10:35:00.000-08:00

The new guy gave a great speech last night - sort of an unofficial State of the Union. I just kept thinking, "This new guy is So Much Better than the old guy!" It was nice to hear the Congress (half of it anyway) applauding endlessly a guy who actually deserved applause, instead of cravenly whooping it up for a frightening demagogue.

I'd be interested to see an un-biased fact-check on this speech - when he says something like America invented the automobile, well, that's not strictly true, but it's also not something a Republican politician would likely dispute. There's always Presidential rhetoric to contend with and, thankfully, at least now it's not being garbled by an idiot or packed with lies. Half-truths, sure!

I also kept wanting him to throw in a couple of "bitches" and "motherfuckers" for good measure. I guess that makes me racist, since I keep hoping that Obama's gonna Shaft it up a bit.

That photo is by Jonathan Ernst/Reuters.

Coming this Sunday: The Oscars

2009-02-20T12:37:00.000-08:00

The 81st Academy Awards will be held on Sunday; as of last night, I caught up on my Best Picture nominee viewing by watching The Reader. That I am a filmmaker and film-lover does not require me to watch the Oscars or care about them, but I am also fascinated by Hollywood history and the film business itself, and that does. I am also curious to see to what extent the "leak" of the Oscar winners turns out to be true. I do not think the leak is real, but I'm curious to see if the author is a good guesser.

The BP nominees are Milk, Slumdog Millionaire, The Reader, Frost/Nixon and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. For me, there is no question that Milk is the best film in this batch. Ideally, we'll see an upset this year - a kind of Revenge of Brokeback Mountain - that will throw over heavy-favorite Slumdog for Gus Van Sant's gay-martyr biopic, but I'm not holding my breath. (Memorably, Brokeback seemed a likely winner at the 78th Awards, only to be upset by the unfathomably stupid Crash, one of the worst BPs in my lifetime.) I also enjoyed Benjamin Button, which was an extraordinary technical achievement and which has stayed with me in ways I would not have expected initially.

I have long had a love/hate relationship with Ron Howard's work. On the one hand, I grew up with him in "Andy Griffith" reruns and on "Happy Days" and with films like Splash and Parenthood. And then there's "Arrested Development," one of the greatest TV shows of the past 30 years, which he was closely involved in producing. On the other hand, I think he's often a terrible director, responsible for awfulness like A Beautiful Mind and The Da Vinci Code. So, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed Frost/Nixon. Previous to this film, I thought Apollo 13 was his best work, so it all kind of makes sense: when he's working closely with history and has strong source material, I usually like what he does.

F/N, which I illegally downloaded and watched on my television (yep, I'm the enemy), has the benefit of a couple of great impersonations as well as being full of ideas; it's "about something." It's about a great many things, actually. These qualities go a long way to making a film watchable from my point of view, regardless of how well-directed it is; Howard is a competent craftsman, so this film is highly-watchable, involving and thought-provoking, if not particularly emotionally stirring or surprising in its outcome. I happen to really enjoy watching actors playing modern historical figures (that is, real people I have actually seen in another context), so this bias certainly aided my enjoyment of the film. My mind wandered when anyone made a speech longer than 30 seconds or so - such as Nixon's late-night drunken harangue on the phone with Frost - because I was taken out of the film at those moments and reminded that it was based on a play. And I also didn't care about the Nixon character, particularly, and didn't care what the playwright felt he should have said. But these moments were only a minor distraction from the telling of a truly interesting encounter, well-dramatized.

I feel less charitably toward The Reader. I also watched this film from a ripped screener (although, unlike F/N, it did not have Dutch subtitles), but I don't think I'd have felt better about the film if I had seen it in a theater. Kate Winslet is pretty much my favorite female star, and she's perfectly good here (I think it's likely to be her year to finally get an Oscar, too), but this is one of those "prestige" films, those Oscar-bait films, that come out at the end of each year and lull us quickly to sleep. It's a film about makeup, period details, famous-actress nudity and the Holocaust. There are no surprises - even the surprise twist is no surprise - the story just marches onward into the gloom. Every scene of the film is slathered with music to help us understand what to feel moment to moment, a practice I find endlessly irritating. Well, I guess that's Hollywood for you.

I was not a fan of director Stephen Daldry's last prestige film, The Hours, which bored me stupid. Apparently, he is set to remake My Fair Lady in 2010. Sheesh.

The Return of the Ants and Making Lemonade

2009-02-17T15:27:00.000-08:00

The ants are back. It's been raining, practically non-stop, for days. This week's theme is "Making Lemonade." We've got plenty of water for it. There's something that happens if you just force yourself to smile every time you react to anything. I think it tricks you into being slightly happier.

I don't know. Happiness can be created, I think. It may not come from the things you think. It may not, for example, come from having a job or whatever special thing you think you want. It might just be the thing that you feel when you smile. If that's so, then you can create some for yourself by smiling rather than frowning or being stone-faced. I've been sort of trying out this approach. If I can convince myself to smile and be optimistic, then maybe I'll start feeling that way.

As it is, these could be considered dark days. But that darkness is really all in my head. People sometimes say, "I'm not being pessimistic, just realistic." Hell, I've said it - or switched out pessimism for optimism. But what does it mean to "be realistic?" If I say I want to be an astronaut, well, that's not a very realistic goal. But maybe it would make me happy to say that's what my goal was, and then something else would happen. I mean, who's to say what's realistic and what's not?

And so with happiness, it's just a feeling. I might be able to convince myself that I am happy, just by acting happy, the way you prime a pump.

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired

2009-02-07T22:14:00.001-08:00

This is one of the best films of the year. It's quite an artifact or, rather, it's full of artifacts from a case so bizarre I expect a musical version is coming soon. Roman Polanski is a fascinating figure; he's one of the unluckiest human beings of the past hundred years, at least, as well as one of the best film directors. Whatever your impression of him, this documentary has a thing or two to teach you. At times, it feels more like a fiction film.

I think RP got a raw deal, personally. The shit he's gone through - really, it's plenty. He's suffered enough. Cut the poor bastard a break.

Indian bones unearthed, Sword murder nearby

2009-02-07T12:10:00.000-08:00

Some spooky happenings in Alameda in the last week. First, a public works crew digs up the bones of an Indian child in the 3000 block of Washington street when repairing a sinkhole. In the press, this child has been described as both female and of indeterminate sex.

Then, a few days later and a few blocks away, a 62-year-old man and his 40-year-old friend are drinking a bunch of beer and playing chess. An argument breaks out, they start wrestling and the older man retreats to his bedroom. Moments later, he returns with a Pakistani scimitar and stabs his friend to death. When the cops show up - they were alerted by another friend, who was present at the time - the swordsman is sitting next to his dead friend on the floor, totally unable to explain why he had done this.

Coincidence? Um, yeah. But maybe I don't have to go so far afield to find inspiration for my Indian burial ground story...

The Alameda Sun published an interesting map along with its story providing historical background for the Indian bones discovery. The A on the map is the modern-day intersection of High and Encinal; 1 is the location of the so-called "Sather Mound," one of the Ohlone shellmound garbage/burial sites that used to be here before it was dismantled and turned into concrete mix, 2 is the location of the bone discovery and 3 was marshland at the edge of the bay.

Streaming Bullshit, a Rant

2009-02-06T16:02:00.000-08:00

From an article in today's NYT called "Digital Pirates Winning Battle With Studios":

“Streaming has gotten efficient and cheap enough and it gives users more control than downloads do. This is where piracy is headed,” said James L. McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research. “Consumers are under the impression that everything they want to watch should be easily streamable.” [emphasis added]

This points to one of the most infuriating aspects of the whole online "piracy" issue. We live in a society that, in certain sectors, elevates capitalism and the "free market" to the level of divinity, and all compassion, virtue, humility, morality, common sense, intelligence and even life itself is to be sacrificed, as the ancients would spill the guts and blood of goats and sheep on the marble temple mount, to this fearsome godhead - let us consider finance or the oil industry or pharmaceuticals - whereas, in other sectors, we believe in crushing into dust any emerging market that threatens the present business model, no matter how dead that model may be. I'm talking about you, Hollywood - which today means a handful of giant international conglomerates.

Is it possible, has any of these brilliant analysts even stopped for a second to consider, that if "consumers are under the impression that everything they want to watch should be easily streamable," that consumers might be right? As far as the MSM is concerned, the only people who would put forth this argument are wild-eyed, long-haired, dirty-hippie anarchist pirates - a word that is used to make ordinary college students sound as dangerous and criminal as those crazy motherfuckers in Somalia who hijacked that oil tanker a couple months ago.

Do you think college students are as dangerous as those crazy motherfuckers in Somalia who hijacked that oil tanker a couple months ago?

Just as suing Napster, P2P software companies and, eventually, music fans themselves did absolutely nothing to help the music industry (1) stop music file-sharing or (2) save its business model or (3) not look like miserable cunts, so will trying to stop "piracy" completely and totally fail to save Hollywood's old business model. Yes, the stakes are THAT low - this is just about a freaking business model!

Capitalism is, by fucking definition, about rooting out and CAPITALIZING ON emerging markets; once a business model fails, a company that clings to it is doomed to fail, too! Didn't you pricks go to business school? Sorry, I mean, didn't you pricks go to elementary school?

But what's much worse is the way the MSM is telling only the studios' version of the story. It makes sense, of course - it's the same industry. That doesn't mean it's not a disgrace.

Classic at the Alameda: Coming Soon

2009-02-05T09:51:00.000-08:00

The theater up the block has announced the slate of classic films for the rest of February:

The Great Escape, Feb 11 and 12
Doctor Zhivago, Feb 18 and 19
Gone with the Wind, Feb 25 and 26

I have never seen Zhivago and it's been a while for the Great Escape - and I haven't seen Gone with the Wind on the big screen. It looks like I'm going to have to limit my trips to the movie theater for a while, so I'll probably skip these, as much as I don't want to. If anyone's out there, though, and you have the time and income - I encourage you to go to as many of these as you can. If the community can give reasonable support to this effort at repertory film screening, perhaps it will continue for a while.

Sure, I bitch about the quality of the projection - but the truth is, no one is doing this. I mean, there are maybe a handful of theaters in the country that are playing old movies. No one goes to see them and so they don't make money. You haven't really seen any of these movies until you've seen them on the big screen, so don't miss the opportunity.

Classics at The Alameda: Rear Window

2009-02-04T16:50:00.000-08:00

This week's classic at the Alameda Theatre and Cineplex is 1954's Rear Window, another personal favorite. It could be the Hitchcock film I've seen the most, though this was the first time on the big screen. The tolerable print today was from a fairly recent restoration; the projection had the usual issues with weak focus which, again, I don't fully understand but assume must be related to the quality of the print. At least, that's what I am now telling myself.

Hitch opens an intellectual can of worms in Rear Window - and his clock-winding cameo here is my favorite - before dashing out an ending almost before you know what hits you. I suppose that's better than dragging it out. I love Jimmy Stewart's curmudgeonly mid-period more than his early cockeyed gee-whiz persona and he's great here as the guy who tries to resist Grace Kelly, which is about the most taxing thing he's asked to do. I can understand trying to resist Grace Kelly. Any self-respecting man would have to at least try to resist her shimmering perfection. She is the Most Beautiful Girl Who Ever Lived, here playing the Cinema's Best Girlfriend, and one would not want her head to get any bigger. She doesn't really seem like she has a big head, but trust your instincts.

You still want to smack Stewart, though, each time he rebuffs her. There's a great deal more going on in this movie, of course, but somehow it feels like all that's really going on is Jimmy Stewart trying, and failing, to resist Grace Kelly. There's probably a lesson in there about movies and what they're really about and about movie stars and what they're really for, but I'm not sure I can articulate it. I just know that, if you've got Grace Kelly in your picture, all you have to do is get some guy to try to resist her, then put her in peril for a hot second and then you're done - which surely explains the wam-bam ending.

This is one of those films that has stood the test of time more for what it has said, and what it continues to say, about us than for what it's "about." I say it's "about" a man trying and failing to resist Grace Kelly's supernatural charms and also, okay, fine, some piffle about a murder and Thelma Ritter cracking wise. But all of that (apart from the Grace Kelly bit) is pretty inconsequential, by which I mean standard and rather forgettable. I mean, I never remember the details of this movie and I have seen it maybe a dozen times or more. I don't remember about the saw and the knife and the ring and the jewelry, I don't remember what happens to Miss Lonelyhearts or Torso, and I forget each time what finally clues in Raymond Burr to Jimmy Stewart - although if I spent more time worrying about the consequences of trying to resist Grace Kelly I might eventually put that one together.

Pretty much the only thing I remember, besides Grace Kelly, is Jimmy Stewart peering into that long lens, the "portable keyhole," as Ritter calls it. This is the film's key image, you might say, which is what Ritter's telling us if we'll listen. So, onto the whole voyeur thing and the psychoanalytic interpretations - but what about: how do we see the film now, as opposed to how it was seen in 1954? The characters talk about mid-fifties notions of privacy; how does this seem to us, in the age of Facebook and Total Information Awareness?

McLuhan must have loved this film. Stewart's camera technology extends his gaze deep into his subject's lives, but if they all turn to look at him, like some networked panopticon of that gaze returned, he might break and break again. What's worse, seeing or being seen? Is Total Information Awareness...death?

The MGM cartoon short, Goggle Fishing Bear, amused audience members, as did the following exchange between Thelma Ritter and Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window:

- I got a nose for trouble. Can smell it ten miles away.
You heard of that market crash in '29? I predicted that.

-Just how did you do that, Stella?

-Oh, simple. I was nursing a director of General Motors.
"Kidney ailment," they said. "Nerves," I said.
Then I asked myself,
'What's General Motors got to be nervous about?"
"Overproduction," I says. "Collapse."
When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day,
The whole country's ready to let go.

-You know, Stella, in economics, a kidney ailment
Has no relationship to the stock market. None whatsoever.

- Crashed, didn't it?

The Myth of My Dumb Friends

2009-02-01T11:12:00.000-08:00

Here is a brief article that appeared in the December 2008 edition of Alameda magazine, written by Mary McInerney:

If you love the story of Jim Morrison of The Doors placing a marker in Jackson Park in memory of his “dumb friends” at Alameda High School, maybe you shouldn’t read any further.
The truth is he didn’t do it. Yes, Morrison lived in Alameda. And yes, he attended Alameda High. He may have even hung out in Jackson Park with his friends. But the real story of the marker is a whole lot more ordinary—albeit pretty amusing and kind of weird, too—than the legend that surrounds it.
In 1920, 37 years before Morrison arrived in Alameda, Isabelle Clark, an old-time resident of the neighborhood, had the marker and a giant, curved concrete bench built at the south end of Jackson Park. According to Woodruff Minor’s book Alameda at Play, the marker was placed by Clark in honor of her late husband. It reads, “In Memory of My Dumb Friends.” A slight? Not at all. “Mrs. Clark loved animals, hence the inscription,” Minor writes. A drinking trough—presumably for her beloved but speechless animals—was originally part of the Clark Memorial but has since been removed.
Over the years, the urban myth arose that Jim Morrison, who was 13 when his family moved to Alameda for two years in 1957, came back and placed the “Dumb Friends” marker to remember his high school buddies. The year Morrison moved to Alameda, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was newly published. “Fud” Ford, who met Morrison during the first weeks of ninth grade at Alameda High, remembered the time well.
“We wanted to be beatniks like the characters in On the Road,” Ford recounts in Frank Lisciandro’s A Feast of Friends. “We’d put on sweatshirts and Levis and wear sandals and go over to San Francisco, to North Beach and hang out … in front of the coffeehouses, or go in and listen to the poetry sometimes.”
When his family left for Virginia, Morrison didn’t leave much behind in Alameda, other than his friends’ fond memories. “We wanted to get on the road and travel and go taste beer in Mexico and see if we could pick up women in France,” Ford told Lisciandro. “Just mostly fantasies: what turned out to be fantasies for me, reality for him.”

More Business as Usual

2009-01-29T18:00:00.000-08:00

Meanwhile, while most people have been hit hard by the catastrophic failure of the Bush economy (such as our double-layoff family), today comes the news that Wall Street gave out around $18.4 billion in bonuses last year, the sixth largest amount on record, according to the NYT.

Obama called this "shameful," but his out-of-control Liberal-Muslim-Communist player-hating does nothing to deter my swelling pride in the lions of business, feelings that will persist even as every one of them is lined up against the wall, blindfolded and shot in the head. I sure will miss them after they're gone!

Business as Usual

2009-01-29T14:31:00.000-08:00

I really admire the world of business and all of its leaders. When you can justify laying off a six-months-pregnant woman to protect your own salary, the human race is really advancing! Far from being filled with a murderous rage right now, I am full of praise for those captains of industry who, day after day, make the smart decisions that have kept our economy so healthy. When you can find a way to protect your own bank account by heartlessly screwing people who have worked very hard for you, you win! After all, this is what has made America great.

Classics at The Alameda: The Maltese Falcon

2009-01-29T14:15:00.000-08:00

The third week of classics at the Alameda Theatre commenced yesterday afternoon with The Maltese Falcon, John Huston's first film and one of Humphrey Bogart's finest moments. I have always enjoyed the movie but have rarely been able to follow the storyline no matter how many times I see it. Still, it's always fun to see a movie like that on the big screen -

- even if the projection disappoints. This time, in addition to the usual strange focus issues - maybe it does have to do with print quality, though I still don't understand how that could be - the film was projected to fill the full rectangular screen. This meant that a good 1/5 or more of the image was cut off, ruining Huston's framing. Back in 1941, when the film was released, films came in the squarer 1.33:1 "Academy" aspect ratio. The projectionist could have used a special lens to project the film properly; don't know if they lacked the lens or made the choice to fill up the screen. I believe that some films have been shot with the intention of "masking" part of the frame during projection - I need to look into this, as I've always wondered about it - but Falcon was not one of them.

Enjoyably enough, prior to the main feature the classic comedy short, The Absent-Minded Waiter, starring Steve Martin, was shown.

Slumdog Millionaire

2009-01-24T22:55:00.000-08:00

Slumdog Millionaire might be 2008's most over-praised film, an honor I had thought I would bestow upon The Dark Knight. Audiences and critics seem to love Slumdog. I understand it to a point; it's a feel-good fantasy in an exotic setting about an orphan from a hellish slum who becomes rich and wins the girl of his dreams. I like fantasy, too - but not brutally dishonest fantasy.

Isn't any fantasy dishonest? Or any and every film, for that matter? Okay, but how far do you need to take this? Some films tell you up front that they are fantasies; Slumdog tries to have it both ways. It tries to be grounded in the reality of life in hell and make it flashy and sexy, too. It "corrects" the violence, filth and savage injustices of its characters' lives with coincidence, shallow characterization, all-conquering love and lies upon lies. I am not usually bothered when popular filmmakers use colorful Third World backdrops because they rarely ask us to take their tourism seriously (in The Incredible Hulk, for instance, or the Bourne and Bond films); also, I just don't give a shit about that kind of argument. But, alas, director Danny Boyle seems not to know that he is a tourist here, reminding me of the gullible travelers in his film's Taj Mahal sequence. Yep, it's a film set in India, made by a British director - and it has a Taj Mahal sequence. Of course it does.

To be fair, Boyle's Taj Mahal sequence is not without irony. I've tended to like his work in the past and had some hopes for this film, in spite of what its ad campaign suggested to me. The first half of the film is rather charming, too, when he's following the main character as a child. In spite of the horrors of their lives, children are resilient - to a point. It's just so bleeding unlikely that everything is going to work out so well, fall so neatly into place, for anyone as an adult, let alone someone who reaches adulthood under the circumstances depicted here, that the film just goes off the rails after a certain point.

That is to say, what had been a pleasant fantasy becomes an unpleasant, treacly fantasy that stops making sense even by its own rules. As one absurdity after another piles up, I start checking out.

As for the viewing experience, tonight we sat in the Alameda's balcony for the first time, which was a novel and extremely pleasant vantage. Sadly, in the row behind us was a pair of middle-aged women who seemed to mistake the gigantic, art deco theater for their own living room. They reacted audibly to each twist and turn of the film, including simple sounds and full sentences of advice for the characters, and they occasionally struck up conversation with each other. Perhaps my reaction to the film comes in part from the fact that I was distracted both by their noise and by what I might do about it.

I considered talking to them right in the middle of the film; I also went over several scenarios for talking to them after the film was over. In this situation, if I make it through the film without saying anything, there's about a 50% chance that I will say something afterwards. This time I said, "Ladies, a little too much talking during the movie." They flattened their faces at me and sort of subtly bent back and away. I continued, "This is not your living room."

By now, Kim had practically turned into a gas in her efforts to get out of there. We left.

Look, I don't crave that kind of confrontation. I don't love to embarrass my wife, or be a dick. But if you go to the movies, SHUT THE FUCK UP. Or don't go. Those are your options. If you are too stupid to understand that, you are too stupid to attend the movies.

Classics at The Alameda: North by Northwest

2009-01-21T16:04:00.000-08:00

Cary Grant is my all-time favorite movie star. It's always great fun to see him in North by Northwest as the ultimate falsely-accused man-on-the-run - although Hitchcock made something of a specialty of this type of film, of course, including another one of my favorites, The 39 Steps. I'm pleased to say that the projection was pretty good today at the Alameda; rarely soft and pretty well-framed. Prior to the show, I asked the fellow at the snack bar whether the staff had pre-screened the print with an eye to ensuring good focus; turns out they did, until 5 AM this morning.

In addition to the feature presentation, the Alameda also screened a few charming shorts prior to the main show: Tex Avery's 1951 Symphony in Slang, a very short promo about a boy who sees Santa Claus in everyone and the classic John Waters "No Smoking" announcement. The latter was especially nice to see as it reminded me of my frequent trips to the old UC Theater in Berkeley when I first moved to California ten years ago. That sadly defunct repertory grindhouse played nightly double-features of classics, foreign films and cult favorites - and always opened the show with the sardonic Waters' bit:

Today, watching North by Northwest, I was struck by a couple of things. First - something I also noticed again last week during the Vertigo screening - Bernard Herrmann, the great film composer, frequently recycled bits and pieces of his scores, or at least that's how it seems to me. I first noticed this when writing a major essay on the use of sound in Citizen Kane in film school. Being a great fan of that film and also Vertigo, I noticed that some of the music in the first film seems to have been used for the second. This is not precisely the case; it's more a matter of very similar-sounding chord progressions sneaking into different compositions - and the very same progression I noticed in those films is present in North by Northwest, too!

If you're curious, listen to the music Herrmann uses in the Thatcher Library scene in Kane, just as the reporter, Mr. Thompson, begins to read Thatcher's journal, before the film dissolves into the depiction of the snowy day when Thatcher arrived to take young Kane away from his parents - and a certain favorite sled. Compare this music to the theme in Vertigo, repeated throughout the film, that can be heard as "Madeleine" stares at Carlotta's portrait in the Palace of the Legion of Honor. I could swear that I also heard the first few notes of this same theme at one point in North by Northwest, I believe when Cary Grant returnes to Eva Marie Saint's hotel room after his encounter with the malevolent crop duster.

The second thing that struck me today was how vividly the film illustrates Hitchcock's notions of the establishment and utility of suspense versus surprise in visual storytelling. Hitchcock was the "Master of Suspense," but I suspect that this has come to mean, for some, simply that he made "scary movies," like Psycho. The trouble there is that it's too easy to see Psycho as the precedent for the slasher movies that came afterward which, to this day, tend to rely much more on surprise than on suspense, to their detriment. (If you take a look at the trailer for the pointless remake, or "reboot," of Friday the 13th, you'll see what I mean.) Here, Hitchcock explains the difference in conversation with Francois Truffaut:

We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let us suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, “Boom!” There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the audience knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware that the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions this same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: “You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There’s a bomb beneath you and it’s about to explode!”

In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed.

This is perhaps the key to Hitchcock's art; throughout North by Northwest, in big and small ways, we see examples of this in which we are shown something that is not immediately revealed to our hero. For instance, we learn long before Cary Grant that there is no George Kaplan; we are shown Eve's gun in her purse, though Grant doesn't know about it; Hitchcock pulls out to show us the henchman waiting on the other side of the rock as Grant and Saint flee across Mt. Rushmore. This approach is a big part of what keeps the film working, in all of its splendid preposterousness.

Can't tell me nothing

2009-01-20T15:47:00.000-08:00

Lately, I've been obsessed with this video that comic Zach Galifianakis and singer/songwriter Will Oldham made for Kanye West's song, "Can't Tell Me Nothing," from last year's Graduation album:

I don't know why recording artists still make music videos, but it's definitely part of the game. What I mean is, I don't know who they are for or where one watches them, apart from YouTube. Kanye made an official video for "Can't Tell Me Nothing," then apparently asked Zach to make an alternative version, embedded above.

The official version features Kanye dancing around in the desert, with a chick in her underwear and a big piece of flowing fabric, some flashing lights, a fog machine and a Lamborghini Countach. It's a remarkably unimaginative video, apart from that it seems especially tossed-off and generic. It kind of just checks a list of rap video cliches and moves on. It's too bad, because the song itself is a pretty good hip-hop track, classic in its themes, poignantly conflicted in tone and bumpin'.

Somehow, in their alternative version, director Michael Blieden and Galifianakis tease out all of West's meaning and create a video that elevates the song far beyond what you'd expect. It's a hilarious video, yes, but more than that, it creates a surprisingly rich narrative and spins out all kinds of questions for the viewer - who are these guys? are they brothers? friends? lovers? where are they? what are their lives like? are they lonely? are they in pain? are the seeking redemption? Even in its absurdity, even in its moments of surreality or literalism, it's never less than beautiful, even beautifully wrong or strange. And some of the shots are simply stunning. My favorite are the magic hour shots of Zach in the straw hat in the green cornfield.

I get that to some people my reverence for this video and the degree to which I am reading into it will seem silly - after all, the filmmakers are just goofing off on Zach's farm with a bunch of cows, a red tractor and clog-dancing milkmaids. One might think they just improvised a bunch of shit, shot it, and slapped it together. I can understand that point of view, but I think it's very close-minded.

Galifianakis, if you look at his body of work thus far, appears to be some kind of genius. That's not a term I throw around lightly. His approach to comedy bears more than a passing resemblance to Andy Kaufman's, though he doesn't quite take it that far. He alienates his audience, insults them, tries to win them back, laments his failure to do so, reels off one non sequitur after another, tells unconnected series of simple jokes, and goofs on his beard, his weight and his own self-consciousness. In his skits, he vanishes into his characters, including that of his North Carolina-bred, back-country-accented, "twin brother," Seth, even as he completely fails to disguise himself. Likewise, in the music video, for me at least, while he is obviously Zach Galifianakis, he is something completely different as well - a hipster-farmer, dangerously unhinged, possibly violent or abusive, or maybe just closed back in upon himself in bottomless sorrow, his fierce, piercing gaze hooking into you. His level of commitment here is total, and I just can't look away.

Wish fulfillment

2009-01-20T11:16:00.000-08:00

Dana Perino, my Bush-collaborator crush-object, is the one member of the administration I will miss. She makes lying hot! I thought this was a pretty funny bit, from last night's Daily Show. By which I mean, it's funny because it's true and we laugh so as not to cry.

As of this hour, Barack Obama is the 44th President of the United States.

Goodbye, dick!

2009-01-19T17:23:00.000-08:00

Just wanted to take a moment to mark the final day of the seemingly endless term of the Worst President Ever. I will never understand for as long as I live how this pathetic, awful man managed to get elected President twice. It's the kind of thing that makes me hate my fellow Americans for being such idiotic dolts. I know there are people that I like who happen to be Republicans and who may have even voted for Bush. You elected a man of towering ignorance, dangerous stupidity and callous assholery. Twice. Thanks for nearly ruining America. Nice work, douchebags.

I'm looking forward to the new guy. I'm pretty curious to see what's going to happen. I'm cautiously optimistic. Mostly, I'm just relieved we're turning the page. Hopefully, good things are ahead.

What a relief!

Catching up with the films of 2008

2009-01-19T16:22:00.000-08:00

One of the (few) disadvantages of life in the San Francisco Bay Area affects movie-lovers like myself. Whereas nearly every film released in the United States will play in New York or Los Angeles, immediately, some of those will never play here and the rest will either play in one or two San Francisco theaters (as opposed to East Bay theaters) and then close, or open at an annoyingly slow pace weeks or months after that initial release. This situation is much better than that of most areas of the country, of course, where some of these films will simply never play at all - so, I should be thankful, I suppose, that I don't still live in Iowa. And I am.

The films I'm talking about are not the multiplex fodder that most Americans think of when they think of "the movies" (myself frequently included); I mean the smaller films that barely have a chance to find an audience before getting yanked from the few art house chains and independent theaters that remain and that never play in the sticks. I should confess, though, that I am not a very good cinephile. I will rarely travel far to see a good film - these days, it's tough to get me to leave the island, though I will do it for a special film that I won't get to see in a theater otherwise or that I feel I MUST see as soon as possible.

For instance, as a die-hard Woody Allen fan, I will always see his latest film immediately upon release. Most of them vanish shortly thereafter, although this year's effort, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, became popular enough to get a wider release and even won the Golden Globe for Best Musical or Comedy. So, good for Woody. This week, too, I plan to go to San Francisco to see the "roadtrip" version of Steven Soderbergh's Che, in which the whole film is shown rather than broken up into two parts. Four hours long? Shot on the Red One? Soderbergh and Del Toro? Violently mixed reviews? Cinephile catnip!

Last week, Scott and I traveled to Berkeley to see The Wrestler. We had heard all the buzz, so we had to catch it. I found the film to be very moving and satisfying, with minimal schmaltz and a quietly extraordinary performance from Mickey Rourke. Marisa Tomei, who has always seemed to me to be working hard (and impressively) to actually earn that Oscar she got way back in 1992, is also great here. I had been thinking about The Wrestler for a few days until I spoke to my film school buddy, Andy, who pointed out how terrible the script is - and he's right. The script for The Wrestler is a paint-by-numbers quickie sports-movie formula piece, with an embarrassingly awful subplot involving Rourke's estranged daughter. It could easily be that "Wallace Beery wrestling picture" Barton Fink finds himself unable to write.

But his argument left me strangely unmoved and failed to change my impression much. It's true that Andy and I have often disagreed about movies in the past - he has frequently said that I "like everything," an untrue statement on its face, but indicative of my ability to be swept away - but here it's not that we disagreed, exactly. It's that, at a certain point, the film went somewhere for me that I found quite interesting. Early on, the Tomei character quotes the passage in Isaiah that predicts the suffering of the Messiah and the redemption of believers - "by his stripes, we are healed" - which she unironically attributes to the film The Passion of the Christ. She's suggesting that the way Rourke's washed-up professional wrestler abuses his own body for our entertainment is not unlike what that Jesus character in the Passion undergoes. After I heard this, I felt I understood something essential about the character and about the filmmakers' purpose - it's a film about a man who believes he's nothing more than a piece of meat, good for nothing but a beating, and about his messy, faltering, daily search for redemption.

As an allegory, in its moving story and in its the performances, The Wrestler far transcends its script; I think it's Darren Aronofsky's best work to date. Fans of the Dardennes will note with interest some of the camerawork in the film, too - the Belgian brothers have developed a distinctive style for their super-realist dramas, two of which have won the Palme D'Or at Cannes in the last decade, in which they frequently hover their hand-held camera just over their subject's shoulder. Aronofsky co-opts this style frequently in his film in a way that, for me at least, immediately recalled The Son or Rosetta, among other films. I suppose if the Dardennes are, perhaps, the most-celebrated neo-realists working today (for lack of a better term), it makes sense that this kind of camera work (hardly unique to them, but somewhat unusual in narrative film) has become a kind of shorthand for "authenticity." A bit of a cheap trick, really, that Aronofsky uses only occasionally - but it's nice to see him trying new things.

Another film that makes much better use of Dardenne-style camerawork, less obtrusively and more rigorously fused with an objectively framed, devastatingly omissive mise-en-scene, is the 2007 Cannes winner, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, by Romanian writer/director, Cristian Mungiu. I only saw this recently, on DVD, and it's an example of the kind of film that I am sometimes too lazy to see. Another is the likewise highly-praised, The Edge of Heaven, which I have had from Netflix for several weeks now. 4 Months I had for about four months. Okay, not that long; as the film is about an illegal abortion in Ceausescu's Romania, my very-pregnant wife opted out, and I assumed I was in for a big downer and it took me a little while (and her being out of town) to pop it into the DVD player.

I am very glad I did. It's an extraordinary film, powerful, clear-eyed and straightforward - it takes place in nearly real time and makes no political statements about abortion, apart from simply depicting the harrowing, horrifying ordeal of such a procedure under a dictatorship in which it's illegal. Most striking for me - because from early on I could see I would not be spared much, though the worst moment takes place off-screen - were the relationships. Otilia and her pregnant friend, Gabita, reminded me very strongly of some of the young women I knew in college. These women had extremely intense, emotional friendships of the kind that appear quite strange to young men, for whom things might be simpler or more straightforward, relationships that are sometimes strengthened by awful behavior rather than kindness, as if that awfulness itself is an assurance of intimacy: I would never dare to treat anyone else so horribly and with such selfishness; it is only because we are like sisters that I am willing to do so. It is not worth citing specifics because - if anyone were to actually read this post - I would hope not to ruin one minute of this film, which must be the best of the year.

I want to move now, quickly, through a few other films that I have seen recently, as I try to catch up with 2008:

Gran Torino, is a funny, satisfying bit of hokum, starring and directed by Clint Eastwood. The trailer sold the film as some kind of geriatric Dirty Harry film; in reality, it's another of Eastwood's sly revisionist takes on his violent persona, like Unforgiven, though not nearly as fine a work as that film. If sentimental and a bit hokey at times, this story of a ridiculously cranky, racist old-timer who loves his vintage Gran Torino and little else has enough specific and unique details of time, place and character to help the film work pretty well. Eastwood's character helped build the titular muscle car as a Ford mechanic in better times, and Eastwood-the-director clearly felt a resonance in this story of an old, muscular American archetype who finds the world changing all around him, even as he tries to cling to what he knows. It's a terrific performance, both gentle and foaming at the mouth, wise and reckless, stern and hilarious. (Seeing this film made me want to go back and watch the Dirty Harry films, the first two of which I screened over the weekend. They're a lot of silly fun, of course, but it's also interesting to see the San Francisco of the 70s as well as the filmmaking style of that time. And Clint Eastwood in the first Dirty Harry film must certainly have the Best Haircut in Cinema.)
Doubt is an example of the oft-tested rule that prize-winning plays rarely translate to the screen. Kim and I saw the film while we were up in Red Bluff, with a very well-behaved crowd, which I appreciated. And I think the blue-hairs in the audience had a nice time discussing the film afterwards; Kim and I actually had a long conversation about it as well. Any film that generates productive argument after leaving the theater has gotta be worth something, I'll give it that. For me, I guess I simply did not have any of the "doubt" about what happened that supposedly drives the film. The story, set in the 1950s, is about whether or not a priest at a Catholic school had some kind of inappropriate relationship with a young male student. Absolutely nothing in the film made me suspect that the priest had acted inappropriately. Nothing. Not the fact that he was played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who always plays total schlubs and creepy losers, not the fact that he had longer-than-usual fingernails, not the fact that Meryl Streep demolished him and all available scenery in every scene she "shared" with him (which made it a pretty fun performance to watch, don't get me wrong - but I was certainly watching a performance, not any kind of recognizable human being). However, it became clear after leaving the theater that many other viewers thought the film was much more ambiguous than did I. Well, fine. Glad they enjoyed it.

Finally, a film I recently saw on DVD that many people probably also missed this year: In Bruges. Written and directed by the talented playwright, Martin McDonagh, it's one of those rare films that manages to balance beautifully between pitch-black comedy, poignant drama and violent action. Tonal shifts like that are very tough to pull off; on top of that, theater writers don't often make great screenwriters, let alone directors. McDonagh makes it all look easy here, making the tired hitmen-out-of-water genre fresh again with clever dialogue, rich characters, and genuinely heart-stopping twists and turns. Colin Farrell gives the best performance of his that I've seen - he's wonderfully oafish, idiotic, hilarious and moving, all at once - with terrific work from Brendan Gleason and Ralph Fiennes. Farrell pulled off an upset at the Golden Globes by winning in the comedic acting category - a richly deserved and unexpected win.

Classics at The Alameda, week two

2009-01-19T13:03:00.000-08:00

Last week, Young and I attended a matinee of Vertigo, the first film in the Alameda's classic film series. This week is North by Northwest. It was great to see Vertigo on the big screen again. It's always an absorbing, mysterious and deeply rewarding film. The print was from the restoration done about a decade ago and was not in the greatest shape, but that's to be expected.

What cannot be tolerated are the persistent projection problems in the Alameda's historic theater. Unfortunately, I don't think I have attended a film in this theater that has not been out-of-focus at least once or twice during the show, or poorly-framed (as it was when I saw Milk). I have been a defender of this theater to some who have been up-in-arms about the projection problems; after all, it's been operating less than a year and still must work out the kinks. At this point, though, these problems are unacceptable.

What's worse is that the theater was controversial from the beginning for refusing to hire union projectionists - there was a small group of picketers during the grand opening last year - an issue that I have reluctantly overlooked out of self-interest (that is, I want to go to my local theater even if I don't really want to cross a picket line, actual or symbolic). Now, with the projection problems continuing, it looks like the theater owner has made a a pretty boneheaded mistake.

I have sent a comment to the theater management via their website, and I encourage other disgruntled customers to do the same. This is a beautifully renovated theater, and the kind of repertory programming they are reviving with this classics series (which theater sources say is only the beginning) deserves to be praised to the skies, but quality projection has got to be a top priority.

That's why the walls are bleeding...

2009-01-17T17:54:00.000-08:00

In a previous post, I suggested that all of America is an Indian burial ground. Stephen Colbert seems to agree:

Cold Trail

2009-01-08T13:48:00.000-08:00

Here's the trailer for a 2006 Icelandic film called Cold Trail - about a haunted dam, apparently. Interesting...

Ants

2009-01-07T18:59:00.000-08:00

Much of December was like this...

Red Bluff trip

2009-01-07T15:40:00.000-08:00

Over the New Year's long weekend, Kim and I decided to head upstate to Red Bluff, some place neither of us had ever been. We talk about one day buying some land out in the countryside somewhere, a place where we could camp or eventually build a cabin, and we wanted to check out the Red Bluff area as a potential location. Located about 30 miles south of Redding, with the Trinity Alps, Mt. Shasta and Lassen ringing in this northern end of California's central valley, Red Bluff is a wild, beautiful spot.
We stayed at the Motel 6 and spent one day driving in each direction. We went up to Lassen, which was mostly snowed in; on our way back we turned off the 36 and went for a short walk in the woods outside Red Bluff. We tried to drive back into town on Hogsback Road, but had to turn back when the fog rolled in and darkness fell. The road started out as a typical backcountry gravel road (except for the red-rock gravel) but soon declined into more of a volcanic rock-studded groove than a road. Kim's Subaru, which like all Subarus is a four-wheel drive, nevertheless lacked the clearance to reliably make the trip.
Another day we cruised up to Redding to see the Whiskeytown area and Lake Shasta - I'll write a follow-up post about the dam there. We saw the Sundial Bridge and strolled around the Turtle Bay Park a bit. Our third day trip took us west of Red Bluff out along the 36, into the stunning countryside where we hope to find a patch of property someday. Rolling hills, broad meadows and a network of rivers and streams, with snow-capped mountains on the horizon in three directions. It was some kind of dream of the West, an old and peaceful landscape.

Classics at The Alameda!

2009-01-06T18:32:00.000-08:00

Kudos to the Alameda Theatre and Cineplex which, beginning next week, will be running a classic film series on Wednesdays and Thursdays. I am very excited about this, even though I have seen this particular slate of films many, many times:

January 14-15: Vertigo
January 21-22: North by Northwest
January 28-29: The Maltese Falcon
February 4-5: Rear Window

It's interesting that's it's basically a Hitchcock series, with a Huston thrown in - but they'll get no complaints from me. I hope this continues on throughout the year. I have longed for such a series since the fabulously renovated theater re-opened in May, but had not dared to hope there was room yet for repertory film programming in this world of ours. I will be attending every one of these films - and hopefully will be able to twist some nearby arms to attend with me.

I believe I have only seen Vertigo on the big screen in the past - though possibly Rear Window, too. The opportunity is simply not there often enough. I hope folks come out for these screenings so they will continue. The theater has changed the website announcement a couple of times since I first saw it; at one point the films were labeled as being on AFI's list of the 100 Best American Films, which suggests they might explore more of that list in the future. Yay! I hope they show Citizen Kane (which actually happens to be one of my favorite films, absolutely thrilling every time I see it, and I've seen it A LOT). I get the feeling that few people have actually watched the "greatest film of all time."

Which, about that - I brought up this series last night at the Lucky 13, where I successfully warded off the urge to smoke as my friends were doing, and there was some general argument about the relative weakness of AFI's list. I'd have to agree that lists that rank films (or whatever) in order of greatness are usually pretty stupid. Or perhaps the word is boring, or pointless. Whether the "greatest film" is Kane or The Rules of the Game or Ants in Your Pants of 1939 is really not a very interesting question. How the estimation of a film changes over time is rather interesting, though, which is why I think the Sight & Sound poll is valuable - this is a critics poll, taken every ten years since 1952 (with a separate director's poll, since 1992) by the British Film Institute, that asks for a list of the ten greatest films. Kane has topped the list since 1962, but what has come next has changed dramatically over time. The first film in The Alameda's series is now regarded as the #2 film of all time, for instance, though it didn't appear in the list until '82.

The best response to AFI's list, now a decade old (though it has been updated since), is that of my favorite film critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum. He rips AFI's list to shreds, for all the right reasons, and proposes an alternative list, unranked, that is vastly more idiosyncratic and worthwhile. Check it out here!

Whereas, this time in L.A., it was like this

2009-01-06T17:55:00.000-08:00

Same zone, different girl. Any kind of life lesson in that, buddy?I was there this time to help Andy with the reshoots for his long-awaited feature, Frogtown, for which I am one of the producers. Here, Jason hangs some diffusion while Andy talks to his actors, OS.Every time I go to LA, there's a new brunch spot to try. This one was pretty fuckin' good. It's on Sunset near the Arclight.Had fun with Ben in Venice prior to shooting.Here we are shooting on the boardwalk after hours.Here's Andy, that soulful fellow, with the rig. Frogtown has great potential, more than he realizes. It's hard to find perspective when you're in the trenches.

I'm playing catch-up now: this all happened nearly a month ago. December happened, the holidays intervened, and there was just too much to do. This week, the first of the new year, in which I will turn 35 and in which my son will be born, I am ramping back up slowly to life-speed. There is so very much I need to do - one foot in front of the other.

The last time I went to L.A., it was like this

2008-12-05T17:12:00.001-08:00

S.O.P.

2008-12-02T10:53:00.000-08:00

I think Errol Morris is one of our great filmmakers. I've been watching his latest, Standard Operating Procedure, about the war crimes at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Not a movie it's easy to get anyone else to watch with you. It's not Morris' best, but still fascinating, penetrating, as always - and, apparently, it has made it past the first round of cuts for Oscar consideration.

After speaking with a former solider who spent a year in prison because of his presence in some of the photographs taken at the prison, although he committed no acts of abuse, this exchange takes place:

Investigator: If you were in the pictures while this stuff was going on, you were going to be in trouble.
Morris: Big trouble.
Investigator: If you make our president apologize to the world, I would say so, yeah.

That sort of says it all in terms of the actions taken after the scandal broke. It was much less of a problem that the torture occurred than that it was made public and embarrassed George Bush. Now, writing in the Washington Post, a former interrogator with Special Forces in Iraq points this out:

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.

There are many voices calling for a reckoning, saying that the officials responsible for America's war crimes, specifically torture, must be held accountable. Scott Horton's is one such voice, in his piece for this month's Harper's, "Justice after Bush: Prosecuting an Outlaw Administration." He makes a number of useful suggestions for how such a prosecution might be carried out and offers South Africa's post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a possible model.

I believe that the Bush administration ought not be above the law. I believe that some of its members (I'm looking at you, Rummy) ought to be prosecuted for war crimes. If you agree with my first statement, then you will be hard-pressed not to arrive at my second statement, assuming you have the capacity for reason.

But it ain't gonna happen. This is the sad place we are today, as a nation. The fog is lifting and we find ourselves broke, out of work, exhausted, morally bankrupt, deeply depressed international criminals, with all of us to blame. We can't face it and we won't face it.

President Obama will simply not be willing to spend any political capital on pushing for the truth and reconciliation we crave but haven't the strength to seek for ourselves. So we will merely try to slough off this disastrous presidency and these terrible years and go on and, hopefully, never speak of it all again. It's a family shame, hidden away for another generation to bring to light, after we're gone.

Bees

2008-12-01T19:26:00.001-08:00

Thanksgiving 2008

2008-12-01T19:18:00.000-08:00

Kim's turkey was the best I've ever had. My pies were good, but the crust was on the cakey side. Gotta mix it less next time. Good times.

We'll always have Pirates.

2008-11-22T21:37:00.000-08:00

Casablanca repurposed as an anti-piracy PSA. Copyright Warner Bros. I am posting this video as a public service because I think piracy is very, very wrong. I also wanted to offer my support for Warner Bros. efforts to stamp out the repurposing of its intellectual property for contemptible ends.

I ripped this video off the Get Smart DVD. Yarrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...

Once upon a time in Texas...

2008-11-22T10:19:00.000-08:00

The inspiration for Coulee

2008-11-20T11:44:00.000-08:00

One of the writing projects on my list is a screenplay I have been working on for some time. It's called Coulee, and it's about a haunted dam.

A haunted dam? Here's how this came about: some years ago, back when I lived with my friends, Hope and Allison, in a three bedroom house near Piedmont Avenue in Oakland, which we called Old Tony, Hope and I were hanging out one day discussing ideas for movies. In fact, we were trying to come up with the dumbest movie idea we could think of, something I could write without concerning myself about things like authenticity, reason, sense - you know, a typical MOVIE.

One of my favorite silly horror movie tropes is the "old Indian burial ground." It serves as a kind of basic rationale for everything that goes on in films from Poltergeist to The Shining. It also describes, ya know, America.

So, a few days later, while we were still trying to come up with "the dumbest movie ever," I was watching a PBS documentary on the building of the Grand Coulee Dam. Guess what it was built on? Yep, an Indian burial ground. Eureka! Haunted dam!

The idea seemed to me to have just what I was looking for: a completely silly, seemingly ridiculous and even boring premise, yet one that was original, and with plenty of socio-historical aspects that I could invent out of whole cloth. That was the other aspect of the project, that I wanted to write a movie with no research at all - so that everything about it would feel vaguely familiar, but have no real basis in fact.

That was several years ago. Since then, now that I am finally actually working on it, I have gotten fairly far in outlining my story, but the "no research" thing has gone out the window.

Perhaps I should interject here and explain a bit more about why I didn't want to do any research. Movies, to me, fall into basically three categories: Great, Good and Idiotic. Great movies are extremely rare and most people do not even know what a great movie is - I do not mean what people mean when they say, "Gee, the new Batman movie was really great!" I'm talking about masterpieces, like Grand Illusion, Citizen Kane and The Godfather. Most moviegoers cannot identify the difference, but that's fine. It's hard to quantify, but mostly it has to do with singularity of vision, uncompromising commitment and artistry. Not all great films are equal, but they are all on a different level than the merely good.

Good movies are much more plentiful. Most Best Picture winners fall into this category. They are crowd-pleasing, well-executed examples of solid, even virtuoso, craftsmanship. Back to the Future, one of my all-time favorites, is a good movie. It could easily have been an idiotic movie (like BttF2 and 3), though, if all of its parts had not functioned so flawlessly together. On the high end, No Country for Old Men is a very good movie, the apogee of its makers' art to this point; and one of the fun aspects of being a movie fan is arguing about which movies deserve to be called great and which ones are merely good. Personally, I don't think we've had a great Best Picture Oscar since 1974 when GF2 won. There's little question in the minds of cinephiles who care about such things that The Godfather, Part 2, is one of the greatest films ever made. Many of the rest of the films to win since have been good, some of them very good, but some of them have been idiotic (viz., Crash, A Beautiful Mind).

Idiotic movies are failures of imagination and authenticity that insult the intelligence to the point where they are no longer even fun. I'm not talking about, say, Airplane! That's a movie about idiots, but it's not an idiotic movie. It's a good movie because it does what it does, on its on terms, with consistency and panache. I'm talking about most multiplex movies, many sequels and remakes and self-important "serious pictures" that lack chemistry, insight and charm, in spite of often obscene costs.

Anyway, to wind this back to the original point, it's important to note that B movies, exploitation flicks and classic "bad" movies are in no way necessarily idiotic. Many of them are actually good. My favorite example is Showgirls, Paul Verhoeven's howlingly awful big budget Vegas strippers (sorry, I mean dancers) exploitation flick. This cannot be an idiotic film, by definition, because it is so much fun to watch. That may be due to its trainwreck quality, but it's such a consistent trainwreck that it becomes utterly fascinating, to the point that it begins to feel like satire. That has been Verhoeven's defense in the years since, that he always intended the film as a satire of a certain Vegas subculture, or American consumerism, or whatever.

I don't think that flies, exactly, but the film can nevertheless be thoroughly and repeatedly enjoyed as satire, even a self-satire, whereas a truly idiotic film cannot be enjoyed even once.

With Coulee, my original intent was to write an idiotic movie that was secretly a good movie. My fantasy was that the movie would be made as a B movie, with second-rate everything, but would also function (perhaps for the kind of viewer who can appreciate Showgirls) as a good movie if you had the right attitude when you watched it. Now I'm more focused on writing a good, thoroughly silly and funny, but also scary, movie.

I thought that by doing no research I could create something that would function on those two different levels, while being essentially and completely artificial. A lot of movies that were heavily researched feel this way, too, and that was the point. The underlying idea had something to do with basic questions about the relationship between art and authenticity.

What I mean is that, given the artificiality of all movies, why do some feel more authentic than others? Is it a function of the degree of literal truth-telling on the part of the filmmakers (i.e., a movie about a historical subject that is shot in the actual castle where the events took place)? Or is authenticity more about emotional or human truth, irrespective of technical accuracy? I'm inclined to believe the latter, which suggests that even the most outrageous, only-in-the-movies situations and behaviors do not matter nearly as much as execution, emotion and imagination. Think about the experience of seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time, for example.

But I do not have quite the imagination and knowledge to do what I need to do with no research. I need information to inspire me.

I've set Coulee to the side, briefly, as I've hit a wall with the story momentarily, but it's one of my chief writing projects right now and I will soon resume. I think I am about at the point where I can begin writing the script itself and see where that takes me.

New schedule

2008-11-20T11:37:00.000-08:00

I have spent some time this week devising a new schedule for myself. Last year, when I was looking for work, I could become pretty obsessive about checking Craigslist and other job sites, with the effect that I would find it difficult to do anything else. I don't want that to happen again, so I've created a heavy schedule that still has a fair amount of flexibility and tries to put my many projects into buckets to be worked on at certain times on certain days.

It's Thursday today, so that means this is my writing time, until the afternoon when I have some project time and some time for reading.

Thursday

2008-11-20T11:35:00.000-08:00

Today I am waiting for my new monitors. Waiting for UPS or FedEx is how I have spent much of this week, or so it seems. Really I've spent more time getting my new machine set up. It's fun to get new gear.

Self-Censorship

2008-11-19T15:39:00.001-08:00

Well, I decided to delete a few posts just now at the advice of multiple people. Probably the right thing to do, considering how the Internet works. After all, I wouldn't want someone else to steal my great ideas before I've had a chance to profit from them! Don't worry, you'll hear about them all soon enough.

Persona Contribution...

2008-11-18T13:25:00.000-08:00

... from phantomride75:

Scum pit mopper Eyejus Pooped Meself

I like it, though it's a little on-the-nose ...

Quantum of Solace

2008-11-18T09:48:00.000-08:00

Saw the new Bond film with Scott and Charlise last night. Here's what I kept thinking:

This video is much better than the film, in spite of how there are better actors in Bond films these days. We sat way in the back, which was a great place to sit (apart from the young children nearby that should not have been there who kept talking throughout) but our vista did not make it any easier to understand the action. As for the story, well, I gave up on that very early. It involved a French dude with stained teeth (a very good actor, the one who looks like a young Roman Polanski), a seriously hot girl and someone from Bond's past named Vespa, which Charlise informed me is Italian for "wasp." She was also able to tell me that the opera featured in the film (at which a group of bad guy conspirators chose to hold a meeting via bluetooth - like, during the opera from their seats) was Puccini's Tosca, and that it was an actual production but without the usual cast.

(About the young children ... I like kids and will soon be a father, but you can't take kids who are under, say, 8 to PG-13 movies that aren't "Mommy and Me" screenings. It's rated that way for a reason, parents! If kids are not involved with what they're seeing - and even if they are, sometimes - they'll just talk, talk, talk. At that point, it is your responsibility to shut them up or leave. For. Christ's. Sake.)

Flies

2008-11-17T18:49:00.000-08:00

Personas

2008-11-17T16:01:00.000-08:00

I have been advised that it might be wise to get a blog persona, rather than write about myself so frankly. After all, as I said earlier, someone might actually stumble upon my blog and decide not to employ me based on the shameful scribblings here. So I'm thinking about it. Here are some possibilities I'm considering:

Media critic Josiah P. Barnsplatter
Life coach Arnaud Tiberius DeFong
Real-life vampire Xian Deng Chen
Model train fanatic Cynthia Gordon-Tlatt
New-age Pet-channeler Sunbloom Rae Lakshmi (the former Mrs. Doris Johnson)
Fashion-monger Lyndsie Dawn Stern
Policy wonk Q. Timothy Bratten Mayflower-Heinz Hussein Lehman IV
Conspiracy theorist Barry Charles (not his real name)
Gentle humorist Thorsen Kohler
Goldendoodle-fancier Marjorie H. Jorgensen
Furry fan Felix Kwon

I am taking suggestions, though, so speak up!

Counter-protest

2008-11-15T12:59:00.001-08:00

Last night around 6 PM, the counter-protest against Fred Phelps' planned protest turned vigil when Phelps' crew decided not to show up. Probably for the best. I rode my bike over to the corner of Central and Walnut, at the edge of the high school.

It was a lovely, warm, blustery evening, a night full of portent. I could have ridden my bike forever under the dark trees.

Kim made salmon, polenta and greens and Val came over for dinner.

More on radiant asshole Phelps

2008-11-14T16:29:00.001-08:00

According to other Alameda bloggers, Fred Phelps' group, Super Idiots Supporting Public Assholery, or SISPA, will not be coming to protest the high school's production of The Laramie Project, after all. Frankly, I am a little bit disappointed. I love a circus.

Apparently, though, his group will be in Hawaii to protest the funeral of Barack Obama's grandmother, which is so absurd as to almost be funny, as if Tina Fey had written the line, except that it's not funny because it's real.

People like Phelps, though, are clowns. I mean, why would anyone take them seriously? The answer, I think, is that we all love a circus. Human beings are, essentially, bored to death.

The Real News

2008-11-12T19:57:00.000-08:00

I was laid-off by my company yesterday, along with maybe 60 others.

Mostly, I blame George Bush.

From the OMFG Department...

2008-11-12T19:31:00.000-08:00

There's word that radiant asshole, Fred Phelps, might be in town, in spirit if not in person, to protest the local high school's production of The Laramie Project this Friday. He's the "God hates fags" guy.

We heard the news via porch-flyer. There will be a counter-protest on November 14, 2008; from the flyer:

"6PM at Alameda High (located at 2201 Encinal Avenue)."

View Larger Map

Not to be cynical, but could this be a kind of "wild marketing" campaign? I suppose it is, whether by design or not - God may hate fags, but he loves wild marketing.

But seriously, folks, I'm reminded of a scene from Manhattan. Woody Allen is at a party with a bunch of douchey elites:

Isaac Davis: Has anybody read that Nazis are gonna march in New Jersey? Ya know? I read it in the newspaper. We should go down there, get some guys together, ya know, get some bricks and baseball bats, and really explain things to 'em.

Party Guest: There was this devastating satirical piece on that on the op-ed page of the Times, just devastating.

Isaac Davis: Whoa, whoa. A satirical piece in the Times is one thing, but bricks and baseball bats really gets right to the point of it.

Party Guest Helen: Oh, but really biting satire is always better than physical force.

Isaac Davis: No, physical force is always better with Nazis.

Crowdsourcing

2008-11-12T19:09:00.000-08:00

Crowdsourcing is when, instead of getting an expert's opinion, you just ask whoever happens to be in the room. Sometimes this works out great, depending mostly on the size of the room.

One of my favorite films, F for Fake, is Orson Welles' lament over the pure chicanery of the "art expert." Fakery, something he knows something about. I admire his distrust of experts in general but that's not to discount knowledge, real study and the ability to teach. Nor wisdom, nor faith. These must matter, otherwise we abandon our discourse for triviality, surface, fetish, whatever, lol ; )

Facts exist. Not everything is a matter of opinion. Srsly, look into it.

Carrier

2008-11-01T22:56:00.000-07:00

"People in the paranormal field say it is one of the most-haunted ships around," Carnahan told an audience of about 70 people on Wednesday at the Alameda Free Library. "It also had a high suicide rate, among the highest in the Navy, and that makes it an active place for both the living and the dead." To illustrate his views, Carnahan and colleague Shane Thornton shared a series of audio and video recordings with the library group. The ghost busters recorded "voices of spirits" on the ship picked up as EVPs or electronic-voice phenomena.
From the Alameda Journal, October 31, 2008

The USS Hornet is the decommissioned aircraft carrier at the old Alameda Naval Air Station.

View Larger Map

I went there a few weeks ago when Mom and Dad were here. Maybe I could make a sequel to my haunted dam movie on an aircraft carrier. It's a creepy place.

The Hornet picked up the Apollo 11 astronauts after they splashed down, then put them in this vacuum-sealed Airstream to protect them from Nixon. My folks wanted to see what that was like.According to the Interwebs, more than 300 people died on the Hornet in only 27 years of active service. That's a lotta potential ghosts. Or maybe I could turn it into a zombie-type deal, playing off the name "Carrier." The lady in this old-timey poster is looking pretty scared already:

A lot of famous people visit the Hornet, as evidenced by the guestbook:
Finally, this very tough-looking guy kicked us off the boat...and then disappeared...

Halloween II

2008-11-01T22:48:00.000-07:00