The Finding of the Snark

The internet is awesome. While there are vast hordes of single-minded, ideologically-driven morons out there, there are those who take great delight in sniping at them. Since everybody knows that arguing online is futile, your only option is to highlight idiocy, hypocrisy, and just plain annoying-as-shit behavior with the spotlight of sarcasm. It's even better if you can work in a pop culture reference or two. This is so much faster than trying to present well-reasoned arguments, list copious links, or just automatically gainsaying whatever the other person posts.

Like most internet junkies, I've been taken in by trolls. I've even been a troll once or twice (but the novelty of that soon wears off). I've learned to hold off on hitting the "Reply" button until I've seen several posts by the same person carrying their ideas further. Then I look for the weak or inconsistent spot and retrieve one of my carefully-horded LOLcats or mocking pics and let it do all the work.

I've been known to bemoan the fact that the Left in general is better at rapidly coming up with mocking or demeaning nicknames that undercut an opponent's position or gravitas. I guess when that's your only style of argument you tend to get good at it. (Ha!) However, I did see this humorous post today from someone on the Right, addressing the "torture" at Gitmo:

You can't argue with Blazing Saddles. You just can't.

Everything’s Better with Muppets

The management accepts no responsibility for the loss of childhood innocence from hearing Kermit drop the F-bomb.



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This is a remake I would wholly support.



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I think Rob Zombie would actually do this if asked.

A Balance of Knowing

Like every other family, especially those with small kids, we lose things. Game pieces, school papers, parts for toys…stuff like that.

Something I’ve noticed recently is that we seem to maintain a consistent number of lost things, though the things themselves change from day to day.

A couple of nights ago, I found one of Cub’s toys that had disappeared last week, but yesterday, I couldn’t find one of his shoes. The shoe turned up, but now one of Mrs. Cat’s handbags is off on its own recognizance. I’d misplaced the first book in a series I wanted to reread, and in searching for it, found another book I’d lost track of during our move.

It makes me wonder: if we reduced the amount of stuff we have, would we hit some ideal point of equilibrium where nothing else would get lost?

The whole situation reminds me of this great quote from The Zero Effect:

“When you go looking for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad. Because of all the things in the world, you're only looking for one of them. When you go looking for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good. Because of all the things in the world, you're sure to find some of them.”

Spoilers Ahead

I do not drink...whine.

I saw where IFC is putting together their first film production, which will be based on Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series.

This is all well and good, but they’re only going to be able to film the first four or five out of the sixteen that are in the series, because they go from Urban Mythology/Chick-Lit Horror straight to S&M porn. Seriously.

Several of my friends were reading the series along with me, and I actually made it further than they did. All the sex was getting very distracting, but Hamilton kept introducing interesting ideas on the paranormal side, like the gestational period for lycanthropes (it depends on what flavor animal you are), and I wanted to see how she developed them.

That all ended with the last one I read…Harlequin, maybe? No lie, the first five pages have a light sprinkling of plot, and are followed by twenty-five pages of porn. I stopped reading after the first few pages and just started skimming, waiting for the actual story to start, but I got fed up with it and quit.

If these books are available on Kindle, I’d expect a wakka-cha-waah-waah soundtrack to play along. As one of my friends put it:

“I won’t read another one unless the title of the damn thing is Contains No Porn.”

It’s kind of a shame. Hamilton isn’t the best writer, but she’s not the worst by any stretch, and her world was a fun place to explore for a while. Anita was an interesting character. She had her faults, but she also had her code. As she’s overcome her faults, she’s also whittled away at her code, and now she’s just a supra-natural slut who’s boring and complains too much.

Obviously, the whole vampire mystique is based on sex. True Blood had sex, Dracula had sex, The Lost Boys had a Rob Lowe poster in a teenaged boy’s closet (!), Lifeforce had sex – it’s nothing new. But when the focus of your novels goes from “Which monster do I need to take out first?” to “Which monster do I want to take me first?”, you’re no longer writing Horror.

From the Ashes of Childhood

The networks are apparently upset that President Obama keeps interrupting their prime-time schedules (Doesn’t the man know this is sweeps week?).

I wonder if they’d be more upset to learn that I couldn’t name a single show that had been pre-empted.

I didn’t watch the address, because I figure someone will download the TelePrompTer script onto their website by tomorrow morning.

With the national economy in turmoil, the President asking Congress for the power to seize any financial institution, unemployment soaring, stocks falling, and basically the whole situation looking sort of “handcart-ish,” at least we’ve got one thing we can rally around:

The creator of “MacGyver” has a movie production deal.

There is no word yet on who will play Angus MacGyver, or his mullet. I think Richard Dean Anderson could still bust it out if given the chance (the role, not the mullet). I think an older, tougher Mac would work for today’s world. There was way too much smiling going on in the television show. These were secret agents, for Pete’s sake (Get it? Pete? His boss?...Hello?). It’s not known for being a laff-a-minute gig. A solemn Mac would more accurately reflect current geopolitical realities, I think.

The creator of the show, Lee David Zlotoff, recently gave an interview where he hedged on the return of Mac’s ever-present Swiss Army knife. Zlotoff was himself carrying an SAK equipped with a flash drive, and he agreed that it was the kind of thing the new MacGyver would employ, but also stated the Leatherman tools were strong contenders because they had a pliers, whereas the standard SAKs did not.

I think he should carry both, personally, along with the flattened roll of duct tape in his back pocket and his “strike anywhere” matches. As long as he doesn’t carry a gun. That was an unbending rule in Mac’s world, and that needs to stay. I also think they should ignore the temptation of referencing the tired “Nuclear Reactor & the Bubblegum” thing.

There are a lot of ways they could mess this up, but as long as they keep Shia Labeouf away from it, I’ll probably go see it. I’d actually like to see a grittier MacGyver, packed with all of the things they couldn’t show on television.

A thought just occurred to me…MacGyver/Rorschach.

Discuss.

Scanning the headlines

Well that was money well-spent

The United States is prepared to discuss the establishment of a political party for the Taliban in Afghanistan, a U.S. diplomat says.

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/03/22/Taliban_political_party_being_considered/UPI-68201237732734/

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But but but…they said it was based on a true story

The movie, "A Haunting in Connecticut," doesn't open until Friday, but curious fans are already making a beeline for the Southington home that inspired the movie.

"It's just been really, really stressful," said Susan Trotta-Smith, who bought the home 10 years ago with her husband. "It's been a total change from a very quiet house in a very quiet neighborhood to looking out the window and seeing cars stopping all the time. It's been very, very stressful, and sometimes worrisome."

The family has never seen anything unusual inside their five-bedroom, two-family white wood-frame house and does not believe the property was haunted.

http://www.kwgn.com/pages/landing_national/?Horror-film-draws-unwanted-visitors-to-C=1&blockID=246234&feedID=23

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Did we not have enough words already?

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/22/BUCT16ES6B.DTL

What the fuck does that mean, anyway?

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Correction

AIG did not pay their executives $165 million as was previously reported.

It was actually $218 million.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29812224/

We could probably make up some of that money by selling hunting licenses.

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For those of you who didn’t have enough to obsess over

http://www.anorak.co.uk/media/204690.html

Just when I think humanity can’t get any crazier, they prove me wrong. God bless ‘em.

And Don’t Call Me Shirley

Jim Silverstein is the author of Movie Quotes to Get You Through Life. The book contains more than 2000 quotes divided into categories such as “Compliments,” “Excuses,” and “Marriage.” Richard Harris (presumably not the actor), a psychology professor at Kansas State University, recently published a study on why people quote movies.

"People are doing it to feel good about themselves, to make others laugh, to make themselves laugh." Harris also says we do it to form solidarity with others.

That makes sense. I know that conversations with certain friends consist of almost nothing but movie quotes. We use it as a form of shorthand – a way of referencing a particular emotion, absurdity, or situation without having to parse it out. Of course, sometimes we just do it to kill time.

And who hasn’t felt that thrill of elation when someone hands you the perfect straight line, allowing you to unleash a favorite quote. I walk around hoping someone will ask “Hey…where do these stairs go?” so I can quote Ghostbusters. (A: “They go up.”)

I was watching Casablanca again recently, and that movie is jammed with quotable lines. “Here’s looking at you, kid” is ranked at #5 by the American Film Institute (“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” is #1), but it also gave us “I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”, “Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine”, “Round up the usual suspects” (yes, that’s where that film got its name), “We'll always have Paris”, “it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world,” “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” and my personal favorite: “Not an easy day to forget. I remember every detail. The Germans wore gray, you wore blue.”

I’ll not get into another rant on people misquoting lines, but I will mention again how much it annoys me when people adopt a phrase from a movie trailer, bludgeoning it to death before you ever get to hear it in context, and completely killing the scene.

On the flip side, popular quotes can be mined by clever writers. This is one of my favorite commercials:

Go see Watchmen

That is all.

One Man's Meltdown is Another's Remix

This is why Americans own the entertainment industry.

Yesterday, a recording surfaced of Christian Bale losing his temper on set:



Less than 24 hours later, RevoLucian pwned the whole thing:

I’d like to thank the Academy

Now I have a free evening – February 22nd.

See, I won’t be tuning in to see the Oscars this year because 1) the speeches always go on way too long, 2) there are only about ten awards that the viewing public gives a rat’s ass about, so the rest of the show is annoying filler, and 3) the Academy members are all pretentious douchebags.

What’s the point of making a movie? To entertain? Nay, my innocent friend. Oh that may be the stated goal – to put a smile on the faces of all the children – but you can bet your buttered popcorn those studios are in it for the money, and only the money. They leave the happiness hokum to the PR flacks and the Marketing shills.

So Hollywood turns out huge, action-loaded special effects bonanzas in the summer to get the money they need to finance the rom-coms, period pieces, and dramas they foist on us the rest of the year, then completely ignore those popular films during Awards time.

It’s total bullshit.

Look at this year’s nominees for Best Picture:

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk, The Reader, and Slumdog Millionaire.

How many of you have seen The Reader? How many of you have even heard of The Reader?

Taken all together, these five movies cost $247 million to make, and as of today, have only earned a combined total of $184,598,493 – a loss of $62,401,507.

By contrast, The Dark Knight cost $185 million to make, and is the second highest-grossing film of all time, earning $531,037,655 – almost a 300% return. But of course, it wasn’t an “important” film, so no Best Picture nomination was forthcoming. Oh they might give Heath Ledger Best Supporting Actor because he died, but had he lived, you know he wouldn’t have been nominated.

I checked the earnings of the Best Picture winners for the last fifteen years, and none of them lost money. If the Academy wants to continue that trend, then it’s really between Milk and Slumdog Millionaire, since they’re the only two nominees that have made a profit. It will come down to whether the Academy members feel they should pander to the gay community or the “poor Indians” this year. Since they slobbered all over Brokeback Mountain a couple of years ago, I’m betting they’ll give the statue to Slumdog. Interestingly, if you read the reviews of Slumdog at IMDB, you’ll find that Western audiences overwhelmingly love it – it “touched” them – while audiences in India and other Asian nations generally don’t like it, complaining about the stereotypes as presented by its Western director.

But people’s reactions don’t mean anything to the studios (otherwise, why would they greenlight a Karate Kid remake?) They want you to give them your money, eat your Mike & Ikes, and shut the hell up. It doesn’t matter how much you liked Death Race, they’ll tell you which movies were really important on Oscar night. I’ll save myself the time and ignore it completely. If I wanted to watch a four-hour self-congratulatory smarmy circle jerk, I’d turn on C-Span.

Today’s really bad ideas from Hollywood

http://www.cinematical.com/2009/01/14/mcg-wants-will-smith-to-play-captain-nemo/

I don't know how I feel about this prequel. I'm a Nautilus geek, informed at first by Disney's conceptualization of the sub, then by a deeper appreciation of Verne's vision. I even liked the version of Nemo and his sub as presented in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And I kind of like McG's work (even if his moniker is stupid). The Angels films were fun summer fluff, Supernatural isn't bad, and I'm really enjoying Chuck. Plus, he's getting his sci-fi cred in helming Terminator 4.

I am worried about his desire to get Will Smith to play Nemo, though. Smith had his chance in the steampunk genre with Wild Wild West, and we know how that turned out. (On the other hand, Smith turned down the lead in The Matrix to do WWW, so maybe it's all for the good.) Even ignoring the fact that Nemo is Indian and not black, Smith only has two modes: wacky comedic action and Oscar-whoring. Neither would really be appropriate for the Nemo character.

Then there's this:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,480029,00.html

Really? A remake of Footloose? Really? It kills me that with all of the original ideas flooding into Hollywood every day, studios would rather churn out the reheated leftovers of meals that weren't particularly good to begin with.

I know this movie isn't aimed at me - who saw the original in the theatre, thank-you-very-much - and that I have the option of ignoring it (which option I fully intend on exercising), but it annoys me that the money going into this project might be taking money from the next Dark City or Memento.

Maybe the studio system should just retire to the nearest Scientology retreat and let the indies have a crack at it for a while. Or, we could follow Ripley's lead:

"I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure."