Movie - Batman Begins and the Dukes

First some perspective, courtesy of Mandy, upon the entrance of one of
the movie's key characters:

Her: Oh no, not him.
Me: What?
Her: Is that Jerry Springer?
Me: Uh... that's Rutger Hauer.

But ya know what? The similarities are striking. Long way from Blade
Runner, indeed.

So despite what you heard elsewhere, Batman Begins is a hell of an effort, if you keep in mind the limitations built into the movie. No, not any prequels-are-hard-to-do nonsense. No, the director,
Christopher Nolan (who did Decade Top 10-shoe-in "Momento"), was
saddled with Liam Neeson and Katie Holmes.
As far as Neeson, the likable Scot goes - well, to quote Sherry and
Terry, the Simpson's purple twins, "You ruin everything, you ruiner."
Between his franchise-sinking effort in Phantom Menace and this, Neesan
is arguably right there with Michael Bay as the worst thing in the
history of action movies. He can do no right. I keep thinking its the
script, because he unfailingly has horrific material to work with (and
his lines in this movie are hilariously bad), but he also is utterly
unbelievable as a tough guy. Or even an in-shape guy. He makes Pierce
Brosnan's anemic James Bond look like The Rock.
Neeson bookends this movie with wildly dull catfights and mindless
gibberish about 'confronting your fears by becoming your fears' and
it's best to ignore both episodes completely.
Everything in between is really good.
Well, except for Holmes, who is terrible, but you knew that going
in, right? Fortunately, Nolan spots the danger early and solves it
with an ingenious sidestep. He does this to her: A) she plays an
assistant DA with B) straight black hair and skin tight cashmere
numbers who c) spends every second onscreen striding purposefully down
hallways holding a legal briefcase or D) in edgy conflict with her
boss, the DA, a nameless actor who is E) cast, clothed and made-up to
look as much like Sam Waterston as possible.
In other words, the director clearly knew from the second he was told
he had Holmes what just about everyone else knows, too: in a fair
world, she MIGHT be a good enough actress to play the Angie Harmon-et
al role of the Law and Order pin-up girl.

(any question of how interchangable the hot-bimbo-DA role is on that show should be put to rest with that link - notice that the bio is for the NEW hot-bimbo-DA, while the previous-generation hot-bimbo hasn't even been stripped from the show's banner at the top of the page)

So, like renting a blow-up castle to let the kids bounce around in
at a grown-up party, what Nolan does, brilliantly, is build Holmes her
own little L&O episode - replete with the Waterston look alike to talk
down to her - to play in while he and the rest of the cast shoot a
Batman movie. By her fifth time on screen - demanding to see
evidence, earnestly arguing for an indictment, telling the cops to
watch their step - I was greeting her appearance with my own little
"Dum-duummmm."

So Neeson is relegated to play against the credits and Katie is sent
out to find Lenny. That leaves the rest of the movie, which finishes
miles ahead of the previous contenders as the best Batman movie to
date.

And it's mostly because of Christian Bale.

Being handed Batman was clearly a make-or-break opportunity for Bale
who, ever since American Psycho, I've had listed right there with Jason
Stetham (Turkish from Snatch) as a guy who needs to be handed a 5-movie
franchise. He crushes this one. He's smart, tough, mean and dark, and
roles through the movie like he was born to it. The entire point of
the movie is to put a story to Batman's dark impulses, and, once spun,
Bale wears the weight of that backstory as easily as he wears a tux. In
key moments, he doesn't preen or overreach. When the moment is funny,
he flows with it and lets the joke breathe - and then has the grace to
walk away. When the moment is dark or tense (which is pretty much all
the time), he lets loose a little bit of the fury he brought to Jason
Batemen in "Psycho" and attacks.
When not having to carry Holmes of Neeson on his back, he's a wonder.
Comparing him to the other Batmans....
He's relaxed and engaged as both Bruce Wayne and Batman, versus the
perpetually lost Michael Keaton.
He has no false swagger or smarm - which is pretty much the
definition of George Clooney in every movie.
And he's not an introverted geek like Val Kilmer.
OK, so lapping that field is no big deal. But Bale is better than
just 'better than those guys.' He's smart, grounded, stubborn and -
when the light goes on - a born man of action.
Been a while since I found myself thinking, "here's a guy who could
play Indiana Jones" but, well, here's a guy.

The toys of the movie are terrific especially the Batmobile, a
dead-even mix of M1A1 tank and Lamborghini Countach. Morgan Freeman
and Michael Caine, both heavyweights in flyweight roles, handle their
business with expert timing (it's still another reflection on Bale that
he never cedes the screen to these two high-end actors when they are
together). Unlike the other movies, the villian is kept very
deliberately in the background, so there's no vamping comic or
brand-name action star to steal screen time. The villan is Batman's
past (and, i guess Neeson and Holmes), no problem for Bale.

Terrific movie.

Also, saw the trailer for Dukes of Hazzard. unwatchable. Since you
know the best 3 jokes of the movie are in the trailer, this mght be the
least funny movie of the year. I saw three quick sequences that
sounded like jokes, but as far as actually laughing? Forget it.
And, Jessica Simpson, tits and ass predictably ablaze, is making a
major push for Worst Fake Southern Accent Ever.
Which would be quite an accomplishment, since she's from Texas.
Who has ever been more successful on less talent? She's like a
porno-barbie version of Tom Arnold.

something else the right is getting good at

pre-rant: read this week's New Yorker piece on Patrick Henry College.
They're Coming.

on with the rant -

example 1: two years ago, two NY Times reporters were handed by a
senior admin official the name of valerie plame, as a CIA operative, in
order to smear her husband, a former diplomat who was accurately
calling George Bush a liar about plutonium in Nigeria. maybe not a big
deal, either the leak (who cares?) or the plutonium (no one believed
him anyway) but revealing the information - the CIA part - was a crime,
not to mention a clear act of betrayal of national security (the
maginitude is not at issue).
if you squint, it almost looks like treason (it certainly DOESN'T
look like Supporting Our Troops). and somebody in the White House
committed it, on purpose, for patently, obvious and cynical, pro-Bush
reasons.
a special prosecutor, reasonably (though surprisingly) was appointed
to find out who.
And the NY Times reporters, who were clearly used by the source for
partisan smearing, are nonetheless standing firm, not revealing who it
was. A promise, even one to a professional smear-artists, is still a
promise.
They are a High 9 eye-roll away from jail.
To sum up: A member of the white house staff places Bush-Cheney '04
ahead of national security, and two NY Times reporters may end up in
jail for it.

(tangentially, Robert Novak, who famously printed the same
leak/smear, is not on the hook for the pokey - and he won't say why.
And yet, he still draws a paycheck from a host of companies that trade
in 'news' - discuss)

example 2: The High 9 last week decided that the government can take
your house.
No, they didn't really. Well, yeah, they sorta did - but that's not
all they said. In fact, it's not even the main thing they said.
What they actually said was that it is not the role of the federal
government to dictate to states or localities what they may or may not
throw into their own local Eminent Domain grinder, as long as that
state or locality appears to have the 'public good' in mind. clearly,
a decision frought with dangers, and the case presented to the High 9
was a particularly offensive one: throwing ancient retired people out
of thier lifelong homes to make way for a mall. yuck. however, the
elected officials - and, therefore, ostensibly - the electorate of some
snobby NE hamlet thought it sounded good and the High 9 said little
more than, "my name's Paul and that's between Y'all."
So what do we, as students of American Info-tainment, know about
Eminent Domain and what happens when private interests hijack it? Any
takers? If not, allow me my favorite example: if there is a single
Eminent Domain case pertinent here - one where a government clearly got
in bed with rich boys and shit all over everybody else - it must be the
backstory to the Ballpark at Arlington, the stadium that now prints
money for the owners of the Texas Rangers where once nice houses of
nice families stood. As trampled-freedom stories go, its no more
horrible than many runaway stadium deals except for one postscript: it
launched George Bush to the Texas Governorship.
So, big picture, kind of an important case.
And its about as one-sided as ugly Eminent Doman cases get - rather
than try to buy expensive land, some rich boys bought themselves a
cheap local government, which promptly handed over to them all the land
they wanted, current owners be damned (Dubya was the grinning frontman)
(yes - they did it as an 'authority' - like that matters).
Just the kind of case you'd like to think a body like the High 9
would pounce on - and just the kind of case they opted to let slide
last week, in the name of state and local sovernienty.
Now, is ANYONE please with that decision? Who would we EXPECT to be
pleased? Any takers?
Well, if history and ideology matter a lick, you might expect that
those who back Dubya on matter of Federalism (less of it) or Greed
(more of it) or Dubya himself ("8 years of Jed, then P will be 40")
would welcome the decision.
Afterall, its got all the ingredients: Greed, Dubya's own personal
history and - best of all - limits on government power. Call it
State's Rights, for lack of a better term.
Because that's what this decision was: the High 9 deciding to NOT be
the one branch of government responsible for ruining somebody's greedy
fun - which is to say, they actively chose to NOT make an 'activist
judicial' decision.
This was clearly not the work of a Big Government Court.
Only, the voting among the Justices was inconvienant to Dubya's
current political needs.
See, roughly speaking, the Court's rightwingers voted against this
decision, the others for it.
In other words, the rightwingers voted FOR a Big Government/activist
decision, the others against.
Again, Rightwingers, pro-activism; leftwingers, strict construction.
And yet, in the right's ever-expanding Every-Day-Is-Opposite-Day
circles, the cry is growing rapidly that this was a 'vote to take your
property.' I know that, because I heard two nutjob right wing radio
hosts say just that on their shows this weekend - and then attack the
decision as 'just another example' of the court's 'liberals' being
'activist.'

So, to sum up: The court - supposedly stacked 5-4 with Dubya
enemies - felt compelled to vote in FAVOR of abusive eminent domain
(which Dubya not only favors but owes his career to) to AVOID being an
'activist' or 'Big Government' court - precisely the label Dubya has
and will continue to attack them with.

So What Did We Learn Today? Well, it's 2 instinces where Dubya is
greatly benefitting from. or being shielded by, the very people who
could - and perhaps should - do him harm. And he's able to do so only
because - ONLY because - these 'opponents' have some regard for thier
own professional conduct in fields where Dubya has demonstrrated that
he does not.
In short: His opponents are more honest, more moral and flat better
people than him - so he wins.

matt

Movie - A World Of Pure Imagination

My wife has never read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Her interest in sci-fi starts and ends with Star Wars and her affection for British humor doesn't go much past a Fish Called Wanda. She won't even sit through an episode of Star Trek or Monty Python's Flying Circus.
The Guide, in other words, is not her thing.
Neither was this movie.
I mention that because I’m about to really lay it on thick in praise of this film, and I want to be balanced: apparently, it’s very possible to be bored to tears by this movie.
Fair enough.
Or, like me, you can be ecstatic.

A few hours before we went to see it, there was a show on TV I caught in passing that mentioned that Johnny Depp is going to play Willy Wonka in a remake of the great 70s movie, daring to tread in the shoes once worn - and worn down to brass tacks - by Gene Wilder in, arguably, one of Cinema’s all-time great performances. Seriously, Wilder’s Wonka is up there with De Niro’s Jake Lamota, Jodi Foster’s Clarice Starling and Bridges’ Lebowski, right?
Anyway, I’d say Depp, uniquely among modern actors, might pull it off. But as I watched the show today I thought: that’s a tall order to update that movie.
Which is exactly what I would have said about trying to bring the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the screen.
But they did it. In fact, they nailed it. As cross-genre adaptations go, it’s right there with Wonka. And they did it the same way Wonka managed to meet and exceed it’s own book: they rejected as many notions of traditional movie story-telling as possible, and they hired the Right Guy.

First, the Right Guy: I can only name three Sam Rockwell pictures, and two are grand slams: “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” possibly the most overlooked movie of the new decade, and now Hitchhiker’s. Rockwell plays Zaphod Beeblebrox, the cartoonish hipster and space pirate who is also the President of the Galaxy (plot will not be outlined here – you know it already or you never will). Rockwell’s Beeblebrox is an instant classic, a rough mixture of Micheal Keaton’s surreal Beetlejuice and a double-shot of George Bush. Anybody NOT see Dubya in that performance? I thought it was glaring (and perfectly appropriate). In fact, I would bet all parties involved with this movie tilted Beeblebrox’s persona toward more American and more air-headed veins than the book’s Beeblebrox, just to capture some Dubya flavor.
Rockwell didn’t climb up on the pedastal with Wilder – he just doesn’t have enough screen time – but it’s still one for the ages. Rockwell is funny, optimistic and eternally delighted with life in the way that only the utterly oblivious – which is not to say ‘dumb; - can be. His body (covered in garish outfits) clicks and whirrs with nervous energy and he finishes every sentence with an unconsciously flip “alright” or similar. Beeblebrox starts the movie, as he did the book, with two heads (one fun and dim, the other mean and horny), with one on top of the other, the lower tucked into his shirt – and Rockwell even sells that.
I seem to remember Rockwell’s Beeblebrox on roller skates, though he wasn’t, just gliding around each scene on his own atmosphere of goofy chic.

(And how long before Rockwell and Edward Norton finally get it on. Something has to give. Soon. I see it going down as them playing co-leads - two brothers or best friends after the same girl, something - and whoever comes out of it the star is set for the next 20 years and whoever loses starts doing re-occurring roles on Desperate Housewives. I can’t wait.)

Past Zaphod, the movie’s key relationship – like the book’s - is between Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect, an odd couple wonderfully realized by a funny brit I don’t feel like looking up and the American rapper Mos Def.
The brit, who I understand is a star over there, is perfectly serviceable as the whiny, frightened Arthur, combining slapstick with desperation as only the British can. I think a less-famous Hugh Grant might have done better, or that Colin guy. But this Arthur is fine.
Mos Def, on the other hand, was a brilliant hire. First, it makes Ford black, which just never would have occurred to me, but opens up a whole new line of metaphor. Second, Mos’ persona is detached and caustic in the Dave Chappelle mode (though not nearly as potent), and why not? The original Ford was a weeded-out 70s euro-gypsie, only his hitchhiking was between planets rather than EU members. That Ford wouldn’t play today, so why not make him an urban-cool black guy? Mos delivers all the key lines with enthusiasm and measured talent. Can’t ask for anymore.

And as for Trillian – well, she was disposable in the book, and she’s even more so here, played by a woman who isn’t Mary-Louis Parker and clearly can’t get over it. She tries the eye-roll, the halting cadence, the lip bite, the all-lower jaw talking motion. Nope.

Then there’s the Hitchhiker’s text. At times, the movie is slavish to it – the movie’s first joke (a construction foreman’s threat to Arthur) is directly lifted dialogue, the first instance of many. Other times, the movie feeds itself – the flyswatters that spring from the sand to swat people when they have ideas, the Jabba-like Malkovich character, the Brazil-like sequence of form-filling in a Vogan prison waiting room.
They all work, and have no doubt: I was ready with the hook.
In all, they got all three phases of an adaptation right: there is more than enough of unedited scripture for even the most demanding fan; where material was dated (Ford and Zaphod’s base note; the Guide’s user interface), they updated boldly; and what is completely new fits with the old like they were forged together (perhaps they were – Douglas Adams helped with the script before his death).
And then comes Slartibartfast and the Magrethean factory.

I haven’t read huge volumes of science fiction, but in what I have choked down, I’ve come across just two invented landscapes that still astound me. One is the interior of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama vehicle. The other was the Magreathean planet factory – an unfathomably huge building where the technicians and artists of Magreathea create planets like cars on an assembly line.
Forget about making the jokes funny or capturing the appropriate tone of daffy philosophy – any movie of the Hitchhiker’s Guide was going to live and die on its Magreathean factory.
Full marks. Even in today’s CGI world, the factory floor hit me with as much inspired force as the virtual canyons of Tron in the 80s. And the simple construction cage with the infinite telescoping rails was the perfect vehicle to navigate through it for Arthur and Slartibartfast (played by Bill Nighy in still more perfect-pitch casting, by the way).

I said before the movie came out that all I wanted was a film that was bravely different. Didn’t matter what that was, just as long as it wasn’t a bloodless, dull sci-fi movie draped over Adams’ book.
Picture “Stargate” with jokes – not that.
They did it – the Vogon’s fleet and horrible planet; the Mos Eisley-worthy bar scenes; the Guide’s terrific animations; even the depressive Marvin (and you got the joke right? His body was, to the every curve, a perfect reproduction of a Star Wars storm trooper uniform, only for a fat dwarf).
And a major shout-out to the interior of the Heart of Gold, the white-on-white, half-ship, half-sofa gallery that the quartet rides about in. Best retro-70s/NASA-chic interior since Blur’s “Music Is My Radar” video.
And as for the Heart’s spherical hull – a nod to Kubrick or to the trash collectors of Quark? Any guesses?
The weakest moment of the movie is the first, where the credits roll over a dolphin show set to the dreary, Hitchhiker’s-inspired showtune, “So Long And Thanks For All The Fish.” I approve of the notion of adding some musical elements to this movie – why not? - just not this music. If anything, they should have updated Wonka’s signature tune, “A World Of Pure Imagination.”
OK, so this movie has no answer to the Oompa Loompas. Wonka remains the book-to-movie gold standard. But ‘pure imagination’ is exactly what this movie needed and, thankfully, exactly what it got.

TV - The Rise, Fall and Rebirth A&E

I remember, not long ago, when A&E was The Smartest Network on TV.
Today, it prominently features "Dog The Bounty Hunter" in primetime. And when you get down to it, isn't that descriptive clause - "prominently features 'Dog The Bounty Hunter' in primetime" - a working definition of "Smartest Network on TV-on-Opposite Day?"
What happened?

That's a question worth reviewing because, as in ice climbing or pictures of yourself in high school, you don't realize just how massive the cliff was until you look back at it.
And I want to discuss two shows currently on A&E, one of which is the most unbearable show on the air, a weekly summation of all that's gone wrong (and no, not "Dog" - can there be anything to say about such a show that its title doesn't already shout?)
But it's the other, brand new show I really want to address. Because I'm teetering on the edge of calling it the best show on TV.
We'll see.

So just a few years ago, A&E had “Law and Order” on heavy syndication as its franchise; the dignified and smart “Biography" as it's trophy show; a long list of smart British imports surrounding them; and the occasional well-produced domestic documentary on chaos theory or Egyptian art or Verdi operas or something.
Maybe no one was watching. Certainly everyone talked as if they were.
First, the network lost “Law and Order” to TNT, a devastating blow. In fact, it was a double gut-punch because, for one, at that point A&E and "L&O" were pretty firmly connected as brands. If you caught a new Law & Order on NBC, you'd think, "hey, the A&E show!" But worse, L&O inspired deep loyalty in millions of the most desirable viewers: smart, spendy. nightly addicts. Law and Order was THE guilty TV fix of the 90s, and probably the 4th best thing about the entire broadcast decade, behind Seinfeld, the Simpsons and James Earl Jones-CNN bumpers.
A&E losing L&O was like NBC losing the NFL, Letterman and Cheers all at once.
What was left? Well, actually, less and less.
Soon “Biography” ran out of interesting people (“next week: Penn from Penn and Teller!”) just about the same time they – idiotically – decided to go daily, and then they spun it off as it’s own channel.
When TLC launched “Trading Spaces,” that made open season on stealing good British shows for American audiences. Goodbye to that revenue stream.
Then, as the coupe de gras, Bravo bought the “West Wing," and promptly gave it the complete "Law & Order" treatment - Monday marathon, three times every other day, the latest one at bedtime, first one's free, tell your friends.
And A&E, like a hard-dumped boyfriend, just collapsed. Today, it's probably the worst network on the air, edging it’s sister in faux-dignity, History Channel. The difference is small but vital: History Channel is War porn, while A&E is literally for snuff fans– true crime of the stickiest sort and lots of it.
“Cold Case Files,” “The First 48,” “City Confidential,” “American Justice.” Dreary, utterly interchangeable “real-life” shows about droopy, work-a-day cops paddling upstream against America’s industry of petty killings. And "Dog."
And the network’s signature syndicated series? “Crossing Jordan” and “CSI: Miami.”
Arts and Entertainment, indeed.
So, trying to stop the bleeding, A&E has taken a couple swings at the ‘Reality’ piñata in recent season (Hence, the "Dog" show). I’ve been trying to write about one of the resulting shows for a while, because - in now-typical A&E style – it went not just wrong, but incredibly, fantastically, jaw-droppingly wrong and is now the worst show on TV, full stop.
And the other might be – miraculously - the very best.

I am not one to be mesmerized by the grotesque (car wreck gawking, etc), but I’ve been pulled into the awfulness of “Growing Up Gotti” for 3 full episodes.
I’m over it now, but the scars run deep.
The show is a follow-around of the Osbournes-variety, only the subject is someone named Victoria Gotti, who is related, somehow, to John Gotti. Daughter? Possibly. Evidently, she has written some junk novels and now is a 'gossip' writer for a supermarket tabloid. Not that you can tell from the show.
There are no gangsters, crime or underworld politics on display (which might have been interesting). Just a rich, trashy woman with more money than sense and her three awful sons.
Victoria is mid to late 40s and fading fast, with bottle blonde hair and store bought tits, filthy-helacious rich, living in a comicly palatial Long Island suburban house. Every item she owns, wears or covets screams ‘trash with money.’
But taste isn’t everything so, fortunately, she’s shrill, airheaded and ill-tempered, with ZERO discernable talent, skill, income or even interests. Oblivious to her fabulous wealth, she is bored by the world and pissed that it doesn’t entertain her more. She keeps ridiculous hangers-on around her and spends money without thought or purpose.
One of her vanity habits is to employ young, motivated, smart ‘assistants’ and abuse them terribly.
If it sounds like she is a subject ripe for great comedy, then you've spotted the fatal flaw of the show. Either by contract, laziness or just stupidity, the show takes Victoria completely seriously, even though the world clearly does not. The producers seem to think they are the breathless chroniclers of a dynamic, modern woman's (and a single mom!) fast-paced, high-purpose, deeply complicated life.
Only they aren't. Victoria is a crass, deeply ridiculous, embittered and angry bimbo.
The Smoking Gun seems to get the joke. But A&E can't - or refuses - to see it.
The counter-example is the first season of the Osbourne's, a show which understood it was filming a madman running his own asylum. Every episode, the joke - sick as it was - was on Ozzie (who, to his credit, laughed right along).
Not here. In fact, Victoria is actually the narrator and very nearly the entire script of those narrations are witless jokes about her life that, as she reads the script over the pictures, she doesn’t seem to get (“…but then again, going to dinner with me is always a major production.” Make it stop).
And if it was just her, it would be one of the most boring shows of all time.
Sadly, she has 3 sons. Not for a year of house payments would I have bet that you could produce 3 Italian-American teenagers less appealing than the fictional AJ Soprano. Yet AJ is a regular Sonny Corlene next to the Gotti kids.
Alarmingly feminine and in a perpetual state of entitled preen, the three "boys" (as she calls them) spend thier lives sulking, complaining, joylessly consuming and avoiding eye contact with the world.
Perhaps the show's only real hook is the frustration it inspires. As a viewer, you need to see these three DO SOMETHING. Anything - they are rich, young, the kind of silly handsome that attracts silly girls, and have absolutely no responsibilities or discipline at all. The mind simply can't accept that three such kids would be so willfully dull. As each episode grinds to close, you feel compelled to watch another because - SURELY! - they're about to come to life!
But they never do.
In fact, since the entire show – rich, mafia-linked family living charmed life in the Burbs – is an obvious Sopranos cash-in, a viewer finds themselves jonesing for Christa’fa’ to show up at their door, call them sissies, scare them shitless and take their mink coats for gambling debts.
Yeah, mink coats. Teenagers all, they wear fur coats (well maybe – in one episode, one of them gets cheated out of some princely sum for a “chinchilla” coat that Victoria then pegs as rabbit-hide - hilarious) and piles of jewelry valued in the 5 digits.
Issues like school and the future do not ever cloud their fake-tan faces, and they are the worst kind of phony-tough (in one episode, set loose in a water park full of similar teenagers, they leer at girls like safari tourists and appear frightened of other kids their age).
They lounge, stare at themselves in most of their home’s numberless mirrors, communicate by mumbling and opt out of physical labors large and small (in one episode they let their groundskeeper set up their basketball hoop; in another, they watch him carry mattresses by himself out of a needed room).
The groundskeeper, though a silly man, is the only redeemable character. In one episode, Victoria, terrified that some dinner guests will judge her to be low class (imagine!), she forces him to pretend to be an Italian Count. He does, inventing a ridiculous history for himself as he and the obviously-trash-his-ownself dinner guest get wasted together.
I want to drop some quotes on you as evidence to the show’s mindlessness, but really – like Scott McClelland, nobody says anything worth repeating, not even to make fun of it.
A terrible show, the worst non-CSI production currently on the air. Catch it just to see how bad things can be, and to boycott the sponsors.

And then set the VCR for “Intervention” and send the kids to bed. Unlike anything else on TV.
“Intervention” is clearly produced by the same people who do MTV’s always-rewarding Real Life series and its documentary spinoffs (I want a famous face, etc). In those show, the cameras find utterly ordinary people who have one, deep story to tell – the shows have titles like “I’m a Mu Tai kick boxer,” “I’m a binge drinker” “I’m a professional weight lifter” “I’m a teenage parent” (regard the latter: get a copy; show it to a group of 14 year olds; collect your chips when you get to Heaven).
“Intervention” is a clear spin-off – the pacing, cuts, and even graphics are all the same.
Only the people have much bigger problems. They are big-time addicted to something. And at the end of each episode, their friends and family hold an intervention, forcing them into treatment almost – but not quite – against their will.
I’m no behavioral expert, but the four people we’ve seen so far sure looked like they needed it. As bad habits go, they were about 3 exits past ‘pissed it all away.’
In two episodes, we’ve seen shopping (bankruptcy 2 years ago) and gambling ($200,000 in the hole), pain pills (stealing them from her terminally-ill-with-cancer boyfriend) and ‘cutting’ – when somebody slices themselves as a release/fix.
You’ll never see an American Justice ‘recreation’ with as much blood as the cutter spills on camera after a hard, frustrating night out at the clubs.
And the horror of the show, which is its power, is that they aren’t freaks or losers but people who have lost their way, slow by slow, and before they knew it found themselves in an avalanche of addiction.
If you think addiction is ‘weakness,’ watch this show.
In every single case, during moments of mental collapse (a frequent event in these lives), each of them will drop into word-blurting, and out will come the language of pain:
The gambler, stiff with shame, while begging his mom for money: “I..I Hurt!”
The shopper, suffering panic attacks in the car: “This… Is… Torture…This… Is…Torture!”
The pill popper’s pills are for pain.
And the cutter… well, use your imagination.
Maybe each of them, years before and a million miles ago, committed some dubious sin or gave way to some human weakness that started the slide, but the people you meet in this show are no more ‘weak’ or ‘guilty’ of their illness than someone drowning in a river.
The shop-a-holic is an actress who was on “E.R.” for 3 years (the residual checks fuel her habit) – then she had, in effect, a nervous breakdown and never recovered. Now she hides in her house for weeks, emerging only to shop.
The gambler was a child genius, graduating from UCLA at 14. Only he never grew up and drifted into gambling to escape the adult world (I thought it was clear, though the show never said, that gambling was, to his hyper-smart brain, the ultimate ‘puzzle,’ an unsolvable challenge that his ego forced him ever deeper into). He’s gambled away, among other things, his parents’ house (the mileage on his mom and dad’s faces is unexpressable).
The pill addict was an ex-social worker, who used to be in charge of 41 case workers. She lost it all to prescription pills. Her dying boyfriend both enables her and tries to get her to quit.
And the cutter – a young-20s, super cute party girl from Arizona, popular in school, an artist and musician, surrounded by friends who admire her and two strongly Christian parents at home (mom is grounded and miserable about her daughter, and gives the best speech of all I’ve seen at the intervention; but dad is serene in the Lord to the point of callousness. His reaction to the cutting-thing: “your body is your temple in the eyes of the lord. You don’t want to damage your temple, do you?” – thanks, pops).
They all think they are being filmed for a show “about addiction” and each of them freely talk about their horrors.
And then, under the direction of a psychologist, they are confronted, by surprise, by all of the family and friends they have left.
So far, 3 took it well. Two of them had, I thought, a sense of relief, the other just defeat. One wanted no part of it and let everybody know it. Awesome.
It might not be enough to redeem A&E, but it’s the best show on TV.
At least until Laguna Beach launches season 2.

Web Site - Media Matters

in the past 2 or 3 months, nobody has gotten after it like
MediaMatters.Org, the David Brock creation. They are relentless, and
yet so simple - ALL THEY DO is hold the bastards to their own words.
From O'reilly and Limbaugh all the way up to Frist and thems - They get
caught lying and say: "I never said that," and MM says, "Only, you
did."

They're the best assassins on the web.

matt

Music - Headsprung

How'd I miss this? I've been hearing this tune for a month, thinking
"Summer Definer-candidate" - and then yesterday I put together who's
behind it and almost crashed the car.

This was supposed to be the summer that Ludacrs came back to the
pack, of T.I.'s breakout behind "Bring 'Em Out" (and, truthfully, it
still is) or of 50's second album swallowing the world (and if you
missed 50's House Party on MTV, take a lap).
And here comes rap's Nolan Ryan, throwing high-90s, smokin' the
latest Young Guns, speed-bagging Robin Ventura's head. Unbelievable.
Even in the days before Run-DMC launched the revolution, they said
Ladies Love Cool J - and now their of-age daughters do to. The Great
LL - behind Timbaland's best track work in years - crushes one. His
best effort since the Momma Said-era, which was about the time 50 was
watching the Fresh Prince in his underroos.

And he can't, he can't and he won't quit,
matt

Global Warming

Follow the money. What a great chart.

Movie Review - Africa, true and false

So, two movies I’ve seen in the last week are both set in Africa, though they couldn’t be more different if one had been filmed in Antarctica. Hotel Rwanda is nearing DVD release and Sahara’s sequel is probably already in pre-production, so their time left among us is short. So while there’s a chance to still go see them, let’s discuss whether or not you should.

Hotel Rwanda, you should. And I’ll just say it: you should go see Hotel Rwanda while it is still in the theatres so it makes some money there so other movies like it can get made.
Don Cheadle possesses the greatest “Why Me?” face currently working, possibly the greatest ever. Certainly in the same class as, say, a young C. Thomas Howell (pre-Soul Man) and Don Johnson and almost up there with all-time champ John Cazale before he put up the most amazing career in movie history and promptly died.
Where, afterall, have we seen Cheadle? Getting screwed by life, that’s where – One, he was the desperately honest cop in Traffic whose witness gets killed out from under him and who then takes one in the chest himself; two, as the most unbelievable Caribbean gangster imaginable in After Sunset, where he was so not-menacing that you found yourself rooting for the movie’s ‘hero,’ Pierce Brosnan (another eternally miscast guy) to cut him a break; and, three, in his defining role, as the immortal Buck Swope, the would-be-honest “high end” stereo dealer who loses his chance for a legit life because of his porn career in Boogie Nights.
Don Cheadle has made a great career by playing characters who get less than they deserve and react in the exact way you or I would: half-noble bravery, half-pleading self-pity.
Which is why he is so perfect in Hotel Rwanda. He faces hell on earth first as we know we would – denial and panic - and then as we hope we would – with bravery and action.
That’s the greatness of the performance. It evolves as the movie does and is utterly human.
The greatness of the movie is that the story is true.
I don't want to spend a huge amount of time recounting it because you should learn about it yourself, but briefly: In 1994, a civil war broke out in Rwanda that was like all wars – fought for the rich by the poor – but because it happened in tribal Africa, it was much more so. Powerbrokers convinced the nation’s ‘tribes’, the Tutsis and the Hutus, to slaughter each other. As the movie makes clear, the ‘tribes’ of Rwanda are nothing more than the still-standing caste-system set up by the country’s Belgium occupiers who pulled out decades ago. To call yourself a Tutsi or a Hutu had nothing to do with ancient, or even recent, African tribal history. It had to do with how low or high Belgium’s white people let you rise in their servant corps.
Cheadle plays Paul Rusesabagina, whose European name fits perfectly with his job as the manager (more or less) of a high-end hotel that caters almost exclusively to white foreigners. He is a master of the well-thought-out bribe to keep the wheels turning at the hotel (owned by a Belgium-based corporation). He begins the movie – and possibly ends it – with a vision of himself as above any and all possible native Rwandan issues. He works for a European hotel, catering to European tourists and business people. And they love him. In his mind, he’s most of the way to European himself.
And then the world explodes.
Half of Rwanda’s population begins hacking the other half to death, co-ordinated by a radio station and fueled by their own poverty. And suddenly Paul is left alone – his white guests are evacuated by the UN (whose politically handcuffed Canadian commander, in real life made impotent by UN rules, is bafoonishly played by Nick Nolte), leaving his family, his employees and a growing roster of Tutsi's hiding in the building.
With wit and deceipt, skills he once used to steer his hotel through peace-time Rwanda’s social circles, he keeps the jackalish packs of muarading Hutus at bay for at least a few weeks.
In the end, he helps get nearly 1200 people – children and women, mostly – to safety. The movie leaves no doubt that all would have been slaughtered without him.
It’s a terrific story told with patience, humor and, when needed, unblinking cruelty, and it all begins and ends with Cheadle’s desperation – at first, his desperation to not be seen as an African which becomes a desperation to be with them.

“Sahara,” on the other hand, were you to buy it a beer in an empty bar, would probably describe itself as an ‘action’ flick - but what isn’t these days? In modern cinema, if you don’t have at least one boxing/ju-jitsu match under spinning helicopter blades, you’re pretty much begging for the purgatory of ‘art film’ status. You say your final 10 minutes were actually FILMED rather than spit out of a computer? What is this, “Lonestar?”
Well, Sahara is certainly not “Lonestar,” and while we’re on the subject, I think we’re now far enough along the Matthew McConaughey career-arc to officially declare “Lonestar” as the best movie he will ever appear in – his “Good Will Hunting”-moment – but so what?
Damon is going to die with a 9 digit net worth thanks to Jason Bourne and now maybe McCoughney can give him a run for his money with a franchise based on Clive Cussler’s swashbuckling novel hero, Dirk Pitt.
I read probably 4 Dirk Pitt books – I bet there are close to 10 – in early high school. Pitt was probably invented to be an American James Bond, only instead of being a professional spy, he’s a professional scuba diver with vague ties to the government along scientific lines – all of which, time after time, just happens to be exactly the right background to save the world from a long line of dark geniuses, psychotic tycoons and rogue tyrants (needless to say, Pitt always get the girl, too, though that plot point –scuba expert gets laid - was never as difficult a sell). As a teenager, I found the books immensely involving and readable, if only for the sheer size of their spirit. In the most famous of the series, they raised the Titanic and in general, showdowns tended to be on icebergs or on crashing planes or on space shuttles or something. Lost treaure was usually part of the hunt. All hope would almost always be nearly lost several times over in each book. A key moment of inventive brilliance always carried the day.
Terrific reading for a 15 year old - though I thought even then that the hero, Dirk Pitt, was a bit bloated with Hero-ness. He lived in a hanger full of vintage cars? He knew how to actually fly helicopters? He really carried 30 year old Scotch with him everywhere, even into volcanoes?
And – here was the real stretch - America’s greatest warrior-playboy earned a paycheck from the part of our government whose primary service to the taxpayer is… studying weather?
Then came Tom Clancy, and suddenly being a buff, Scuba-diving weatherman wasn’t good enough to fight evil. What was required was usually a degree from Holy Cross or Annapolis, current subscriptions to Jane’s and Barrons, and lifelong membership in the Republican party. America’s fictional answer to James Bond, it turned out, wasn’t an over-sexed, deep-tan scuba playboy, but Oliver North.
Seriously – what DIDN’T the 80s ruin?
“Sahara” shrugs off most of those bonds, but some things have changed for good, so “Sahara” delivers a blazingly tan McCounghey as Pitt, but he’s not a weatherman but rather – try not to yawn – an ex-Navy Seal who now dives for buried treasure.
The movie starts fantasticly – really, for 30 minutes I thought we had found the new “Ronin” – but slowly disintegrates towards typical ‘blow-up-the-bad-guy’ video game fare.
The plot: At the end of the US civil war, a steel plated Confederate gunboat made a run past the Yankee blockade and was never seen again. The movie opens brilliantly depicting this nighttime run, with hardly a single word exchanged onscreen as anonymous men fight desperately to save their ship – dark and cramped as a tomb - and themselves from unseen enemies, who lob firey cannonballs at them from the fog.
Then you get the credits, which roll over a constant, zooming tour of a modern-day room, where every corner and spare inch of wall is covered with newspaper clippings about Pitt and his sidekick and their past searches for treasure (including the Titanic). As the credits wind down, the camera finds the room’s desk, where we discover that the room is actually on a boat which is even now asea seaching for more treasure.
Which McConaughey almost immediately surfaces with.
Great opening.
However, neither the movie, McConaughey nor anyone else in the movie are given time to breathe as several intricate and worthy plot twists are piled on the screen much too quickly (if Pitt, prowling the Lagos, Nigeria underworld, finds his way to a dark shop in a dark alley to retrieve a dark, ancient clue for the plot’s key dark, ancient mystery, isn’t that worth, say, 2 or 3 minutes of screen time and a few strokes of the creative brush, just to get you in the mood? It gets maybe 30 seconds and you sort of end up thinking: is this Nigeria or New Jersey?)
Escorting McConaughey through out is the vastly underrated Steve Zahn. He plays a re-worked version of Pitt’s constant sidekick, Al Giordino. Here Zahn is Pitt’s exNavy buddy, nearly as much a superman as Pitt himself. And Zahn, a master of the comedy of panic, does his best to keep McConaughey loose. The movie would have sunk much quicker without him.
OK, so Pitt and his crew head up river out to find an Ebola-like plague and, maybe, the lost Confederate ship.
A fun boat-vs-boat gun battle ensues, which leaves Pitt and Zahn on camels, which leads to a gun fight with the local army (that fight, by the way, is actually pretty well executed. I’m always grateful when gun-fighting actors, rather than making pained faces or yelling laugh lines or dropping ‘you’re terminated’ quips, actually act like they want to WIN THE FIGHT. Yes, it’s been a while since I saw a Navy SEAL switch from shooting a rifle right- to left-handed, but their heart is in the right place).
Then the wheels start to seriously come off.
It turns out – and this is just laziness- the ‘villian’ is building some kind of, err, perfect toxic waste disposal machine in the desert (within sight, by complete coincidence, of the confederate gunboat hulk – pure chance!). So to be clear: to this point, our villian has killed off doctors and bought off governments and armies, and generally acted terribly; and Pitt and friends discover that his REAL plot is to… recycle!!!!
Only his huge recycler doesn’t work right, so actually he’s… POLLUTING!!!! Not even on purpose.
And that’s it. That’s the big dark secret at the center of the movie. An ‘evil’ tycoon wants to recycle, but is really bad at it.
(ANOTHER thing the 80s ruined – with the Russians no longer a credible threat, there’s no real reason a white guy would ever be an evil genius, at least not where Americans would care. Where once Goldfinger, Drax industries, Spectre and even the occasional free-lancing communist General threatened the world, we now get incompetent garbage men).
After some fisticuffs beneath some rotors (see above), the tycoon hires out the local warlord and his army to find and destroy Pitt and their climactic showdown manages to directly rip-off TWO Rambo movies, simultaneously. I’ll leave you some suspense by letting you figure out which two.
Still, much goes right early and often in Sahara, despite the dead weight of a sexless Penelope Cruz. This was a role for an SNL girl, not Tom Cruise’s ex. By way of making up for it, the movie surrounds McCoughney with plenty of other fleshy delights: smartly picked classic rock tunes – Skynard, Steppenwolf, Grand Funk – raggedy clothes and glowing backlighting. He’s quite a piece, as Mandy let me know several times during our screening.
At one point, before the strings get cut, McConaughey lets go a clever line which Cruz tries to cattily dismiss, but he volleys it right back with his go-to smile and a Dude-that’s-Wooderson-delivery: “The world would be a whole lot cooler if you did.”
This movie isn’t anywhere near great, but it almost was. I hope they don’t give up on the franchise.

FINAL TANGENT:

with the release of Sahara, McConaughey has now played, by my count, six memorable roles. Not in six memorable movies, or even six good movies. Six memorable roles.
Here are the names of those 6 characters:

Dirk Pitt
Denton Van Zan
Palmer Joss
Tip Tucker
Buddy Dees
Wooderson

(the last is David Wooderson, but Dazed and Confused’s Wooderson is “Wooderson.”)

Does that not read like the two-deep chart for receiver at Texas Tech? Or possibly the ‘featuring’ section of the credits in a porno movie? Dirk, Denton, Palmer, Tip, Buddy, Wooderson. Awesome.

The only marginal role on that list is Tip Tucker, but don’t underestimate it. Tucker was the crazed trucker in Larger Than Life, the widely ignored Bill Murray comedy about an elephant. Oh well – Western Civ’s loss. McConaughey was absolutely lights-out (not to mention unrecognizable) as the raving lunatic Tip.
The others are: Sahara (Pitt; pretty good), Reign of Fire (Van Zan; not a great movie but under-rated), Contact (Joss; intriguing but flawed) and Lonestar (Dees; I’ll return to Lonestar later).

Pay-A-Leak

"Now I gotta give a shout-out to Seagram's gin, cuz i drink it and they're payin' me for it."

- a delightful line from last year's Freak-a-Leak, 2004's most inventive and dancable and rap song (some readers may recall I called it as the Coming Thing in March). the song was, you may remember, Petey Pablo's raunchy, miles-over-the-top ode to himself and mysoginy.
spelled wrong, sorry. that line was in the final fade out of the song, literally shouted over the beat as the song ended (between Lil' John yelps).
it was, i thought, the final, hilariously absurd touch to a song of
absurd hyperbole. A rapper claiming that not only does he party so
hard that he needs to give his gin a shout out, but he's such a major
star that a gin maker pays him for it.
i laughed everytime I heard it - which was some percentage of the
350,000+ times the song played on American radio.
I know that number because, apparently, they WERE paying him for it.
It's the newest thing, apparently: paying rappers to plug products.
Pablo was one of the first. McDonald's just got into the biz this
summer. up to $5 per time the song plays on the radio.

Harry Shearer has the story on LeShow this past week: click on "The trades"

unreal.

matt

Book review

I've just read a superb book, The Emperor of Scent by Chandler Burr.
it's non-fiction and though I can't put it solidly among my all-time non-fiction favorites, it's definetly the most absorbing book i've read in a year or so.

At a time when Malcolm Gladwell's unfocused, vague and even sometimes contradictory 'Blink' is the "It" book of the Spring, this one is the real thing: a tight, witty narrative about a science problem, with a terrific protagonist and - here's the key bit - a fantastic mystery.

The subject is the sense of smell and the search to discover how it works, which absolutely no one knows. We know the other four, of course: Sight (rods and cones), touch (potassium pump), taste (buds) and even sound (3 interlocked bones per ear so delicate that they
arguably prove Divine intent) are all taught in junior high. Duh.

But smell? Err... well, see, you've got the molecules, right, and they float up towards your nose, see, and... errr...
Not a clue.

Burr opens the book with the terrific observation that not only do we not know how it is done, but if you compare it to the other body systems most scientists assume are most like smell (digestion and immune system), we shouldn't be able to smell anything at all.

Now THAT'S how you start a book.

Digestion knows how to digest a set number of things - from turnip roots to chicken wings to wine - because over 100,000 years of evolution, the stomach has developed ('selected' in evolutionary terms) a certain number of enzymes to take down food that ancient man ate.
And the very second you eat something on the list, your digestive system (alerted by taste) goes to work. But since cavemen didn't eat, say, plastic - or metal or a million other modern molecules - the stomach doesn't know how to digest it. ever.
Now immunization, which is opposite: it can fend off anything,
including amazingly complex and virulent bugs, that were utterly
unknown prior to 1900. Or yesterday. You can be allergic - a healthy
reaction to strange substances - to almost anything. But the immune
system takes time - a new, crazy strain of flu enters your body and you
get sick for a week, not from the flu but because your immune system is
hashing out the right strategy. eventually, the immune system figures
it out and rids the body of it.
To sum it up, imagine you ingest two things that were discovered in
the 70s: the Ebola virus and a Matchbox Car. Let's say you swallow a
Matchbox Car and contract Ebola on the same day. It will take a few
days, but your immune system will wage a war with the Ebola so violent
that you might die in the battle. Immune systems go down fighting.
But if you live (or even if you don't), that Matchbox Car will sit
in your stomach, untouched, until... well, ya know, it leaves.
The digestive system either works or it doesn't, right away. The
immune system takes all comers, but it needs time.

Not smell. Hold your nose to a bottle of the latest, most complex
molecule produced by a chemical factory, and you will instantly smell
it. No human could have ever smelled this molecule, or anything like
it, before - so evolutionary programming is out. And there is
absolutely no delay for the brain processing it - so much for the body
engineering a response.
So why does Northern New Jersey smell so bad? What the hell is
going on?

If you want to hook me into your book, that's how you write a first
chapter. And Burr did, so i pressed on.

Enter a French/Italian/English professor (he splits his time between
the three) named Luca Turin who is a biologist but is a life-long nut
for perfume. He writes, on his own, a Zagats-style book about the
world's perfume, just because he likes them and realizes suddenly that
no one has ever written anything like it before. In fact, he suddenly
realizes he is one of the world's leading experts on smells, by
default. He meets perfumers, goes to their secret, huge factories and
the more he sees, the more he realizes that the multi-biollion dollar
industry has no idea how they do it - they produce thousands of random
chemicals and hope they find a dozen that smell good.
And then one day, as he thumbs through some odd, forgotten medical
or scientific textbook just for fun, it hits him like the apple hitting
Newton on the head - he knows how smell works. Now he has to prove it.
And off goes the book.

Turin's answer is - wait for it! - complex. Still, as a book likes
this requires, Burr is very good at breaking it down to basic, "the
electrons are the traffic, the lightswitch is the drawbridge"-level
english. But to give you just the slightest hint, Turin concludes that
smell must be like sight and sound rather than digestion and immune
response.
Here's my farthest dive into science-talk: digestion and immune
response is based on the shape of molecules - in the stomach and in the
white blood cells, the body reads, and attacks, the shape of a molecule
- fine; light and sound are based on waves (of sound and of light) and
specifically frequency - red is 400Khz of light, high-C is 20,000khz of
sound, etc; everyone has always assumed that smell is based on
molecular shape - Turin decides that it must be molecular frequency,
which is - deep breath - measured by how tight a molecule's electrons
are tied to it. OK, that's it for geek-speak.
Using that notion - frequency - it makes perfect sense that a
gigantic molecule developed by Dupont can smell precisely the same as,
say, fresh cut grass. Dupont polymers and grass molecules certainly
don't have the same shape - it would be comparing a mountain bike to a
747. But, if you add up their electrons, just by coincidence they both
vibrate with the same frequency. That's well-accepted chemistry.
And - lookee here - they just HAPPEN to smell the same!!!!
Turin collects evidence like that and then gets into some some crazy
biology-meets-chemistry-meets-physics-meets-perfume geek. I'm pretty
sure i roughly understood all of it.

So it's a good story.
But it's a great book because Burr can write so damn well,
specifically about a subject which is maddeningly difficult to write
about: smell. Over and over again in the book, he credits Turin,
perfume-book-author, with the gift of being able to put smell into
words. But Burr clearly has the same gift.
So you end up reading page after page of wonderfully constructed
essays and description on smells ("an initial note of cumin that
trumpets the arrival, in the background, of not-quite-ripe mango and a
Turkish alley after a strong rain") that, if left to you or I would be,
"like cheese, only maybe like apple." But burr and Turin describe
smells - particularly complex, perfumy smells - like long, intircate
pieces of music or deeply meaningful paintings. Which, really, smell
has every right to be treated as.
(burr recently wrote a piece in the New Yorker about a perfumer for
a major fashion house, which offered a glimpse of this. if you saw
that, this is 300 pages of it).

It's a smart book on just about every level, and if it has a flaw
it's that it sides so violently with Turin's theory over the rest of
the science world. The scientists who believe in the Shape-theory of
smell (which is to say, ALL scientists except Turin) are portrayed as
monkeys. Maybe they are. The case seems strong. but then, the book's
about Turin, so you'd expect that.
Fine. it's Burr's book.

Emperor of Scent. Give it a sniff.

matt

Pope

If i was the Onion, I would run a headline like:

"Bush nominates Tommy Franks new Pope."

Movies, Football - And Anne Archer besides!

You may not yet have seen "Man of the House," which came
out this week, though you probably are familiar with it's prequel
from last year, which was about a college cheerleader who was rejected by the University of Texas.
Now, thankfully, we have a document of some of who made the cut.

I promise that joke (gotta follow the link to get it) is funnier than anything in the movie, even if
you're a Republican.

So what does a Tommy Lee Jones-meets-five-giggly/bouncy/murder-witnessing-Texas-cheerleaders
movie have to offer? Not surprisingly, you get lots of long,
gratuitous leers at a very scantily-clad Austin. Threadgills, Buffalo
Billiards and Mangia Pizza are all pushed up, mashed together and
presented beneath plunging necklines. And there are plenty of slow,
lingering aerial shots of UT's campus, it's form dripping in
lucious see-through sunlight, it's perky architecture poking
through the foliage. Not 10 minutes ever pass without a shot of the
clocktower throbbing upward.
And there's also hot chicks with big tits.

In short, a little something for everyone – except, I guess, for
Republicans (it’s my favorite drum, dammit, and I’m
gon’ bang it).

Actually, the whole affair is about as awful as you’d expect and
might already be gone from your local Cineplex and little missed.
Still, beforehand, I thought it had a chance. Afterall, look at
who’s in it: Tommy Lee Jones as his usually reliable Grim Cop (a
Texas Ranger, no less); Cedric the Entertainer enlisted for comic
relief; and five rightfully unknown actresses charged with nothing more
stressful than looking, preening and bouncing like bimbos. If you need
the plot, here ya go: Tommy’s smileless, all-business cop is
charged with protecting the five girls, who together witnessed a murder
(during official cheerleading duties, no less), and so he goes
undercover as an assistant cheerleading coach.

Put like that, how did it miss?

I thought it was also a hopeful sign that the movie got a real
school – a real big school, in fact – to fully commit to
playing host. Afterall, very nearly every ‘campus’ movie
or TV show ever filmed was set on “California University”
or “Texas State” or “Faber College” or some
such place. Not this one – the movie is, if nothing else, a 90
minute infomercial for Austin nightclubs and UT fan apparel. The UT
band gets two scenes, every key sequence is filmed at a campus landmark
and – for you authenticity geeks – during a UT football
game against Arkansas (in Darryl Royal stadium), the UT running back
gets hit for a loss. They didn’t miss much.

Except, sadly, for jokes. Using generous standards, I counted a
total of four jokes in the whole movie. Two were witless but grimly
determined set pieces that finally drag an ok-I-smiled-for-a-second
grin out of you (example: Tommy gets the cheerleaders to wear more
clothes (“jogbras ARE clothes!” one protests) by installing
a huge air conditioner (refrigerator idea: funny; less skin: not
funny)). But two jokes were shockingly efficient,
here-comes-the-pitch-and-a-long-high-drive-to-deep-center hits. Both,
not surprisingly, were rifs on the movie’s central joke (Tommy
Lee Jones? A cheerleading coach?).

In one, Tommy is pulled, unprepared, in front of a UT pep rally, where
he akwardly addresses a few hundred fans. Holding a candle and clearly
bewildered, he mumbles into the mic that the candle represents, "err,
the spirit of every Longhorn fan that can, err, never be extinguished."

And the candle promptly goes out.

In the second, he tries to awkwardly ask out a hot professor played by
Anne Archer. He has already turned her down once, too concerned with
blowing his cover or (worse!) endangering the cheerleaders, but now his
achin’ heart has reconsidered and he says, well, I wanted to ask
you out before but “it’s just so hard to find time in my
schedule as a, err, assistant cheerleading coach.”

SCREEEEECH- CRASH! WAIT A SECOND!!! Did I just say ANNE ARCHER?!?!?
Yip, Anne Archer, probably one of the top three dignified and serious
actresses in Hollywood, right here in the middle of the swirl. She
plays a literature professor (natch) connected to the plot by the
jiggliest of the girls, who is taking – and failing (natch) - one
of her classes. Or something.

Anne Archer, Tommy Lee Jones and the licensing fee for full access to
the UT campus; I think my instinct was right - somebody wanted to make
a movie here. I wonder what happened?

Well, one clue can be found in the bizarre appearances of current
harmless-funny-black-guy Cedric the Entertainer. Heavily touted in the
trailers, Cedric makes two – or is it three? – bafflingly
small appearances, all of which reek of a desperate, 11th-hour rewrite.

At a guess, I'd say the producers - unhappy with the
Jones-Archer-UT product - decided to pay Cedric for one day of work and
to bolt whatever footage they got out of him onto the movie, regardless
of how bad it matched. Not surprisingly, they ended up with a 2-foot
fin on the back of a Civic. If you pay attention (not that I would
suggest it), you'll notice that if Cedric's tiny appearances - all shot on the same studio set – were eliminated
from the movie, it wouldn’t require a single line to be changed
elsewhere in the movie. Another clue: though Cedric’s cameos
appear at the beginning, middle and end of the movie, he wears the same
outfit in all three and Tommy wears the same thing in two of them.

And then there’s the plot – who shot who, and why and how
it gets sorted out. It’s tedious, sort of obvious but more just
irrelevant. I mean, crooked cops, mob money, kidnapped kids, whatever-
bring back the boobs! To the film’s credit, they avoided the
most obvious possible cliché: the Big Showdown (Tommy-vs-Bad Guy)
does NOT occur in the fourth quarter of The Big Game.

Of course, that would have demanded summoning a realistic vision of UT
beating OU and I guess Spielberg was busy that week.

OK, enough shots at UT’s football program, boob jokes and
pseudo-erotic descriptions of overrated Texas cities. Maybe I should
have quit with the Fahrenheit 911 joke.

"This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. Having said that, all options are on the table."

bang bang bang!,
matt

ps - first-ever use if "natch." yes? no? I'm torn. Wonkette kills
with it but then... she's SUPPOSED to sound like a chick.

Football - Arbitrary Brand Loyalty, Part I

NoDoubt
Originally uploaded by pjmatt05.

If you find a more Exuberantly Cheesy token of Arbitrary Brand Loyalty, buy it.

I'll be wearing this one.



(special thanks to Darin 'Deke' Slayton, USC Grad and fearless 210th Rescue Squadron HH-60 pilot, for bringing me back the hat, DY-rect from the USC bookstore)

TV - Arbitrary Brand Loyalty, Part Dog

When it comes to rooting without reason, second only to college football must be the The Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, aired annually about this time on USA. And lots of people agree, cuz USA just renewed the contract 'til 2016.

It just so happens that I own Oscar,, an Australian Shepard and, by coincidence, the Best Looking Dog In (depending on your scope of inquiry), Anchorage, Alaska or All The World.
And as anybody knows, the Australian Shepard is the sworn mortal enemy of the hated, filthy, no-good show-off Border Collies.
Oh, we hate Border Collies. HATE 'EM! Why, it's like comparing a sorority girl at USC to a sorority girl at UCLA, or a frat party at the University of Texas to a frat party at the University of Oklahoma, a Georgia tailgater to a Florida tailgater or an ethics-in-sports lecture at Florida State to an ethics-in-sports lecture at Miami.
It's night and day, with one clearly the prime, finished product of Evolution's Grand Plan, the other just a sorry, wore-out excuse of a miserable creature not worthy to polish the third set of scuffed shoes in the "25-cent" bin at the other's garage sale in hell!
Piss on border collies, is all.
And of course, what Mt. Washington is to weather, Westminster is to dog shows. Which, to my eyes (not to mention Oscar's) is just one more chance for a steely-eyed Aussie to stomp the bleeding guts out of a no-good, show-off Border Collie.

That, and watch about 200 breeds of dogs be fawned over by the strangest collection of televised people this side of the CMAs.

First, my favorite Westminster viewing story comes from 2001, when I went to New Hampshire for a medical class. Also attending was a friend of mine from PJ school, Will Willis, who was always the hardest partying guy in the room, but at that time was deep in maritial difficulties, which only bumped his want-to to whole new level. He was in New Hampshire to commit as much self-abuse as possible, and you were with him or you were against him.

So, half drunk on a Tuesday, he called my room - I'd guess I was fifth or sixth down his list of possible recruits - and demanded I drag my lightweight, cherry-ass out into the New Hampshire night to drink, chase tail and, maybe, a little arson.
No, I said 10 or so times.
What the F else have you got to do? he demanded in the kind of voice that absolutely was not interested in a reply. And of course, I had nothing to do, which was exactly what I wanted but not at all what Will wanted to hear. I was also flipping channels throughout Will's pitch and had stopped on Westminster during this bit so I said, in what i thought was an off-handed, hysterically ironic way: "The dog show's on. I want to see who wins."
And for the first time in the 3 years I'd known Willis, he was speechless.
"The DAWG SHOW!?!?!" And I knew I'd screwed up. Right then, in those 2 seconds, I knew I would literally never hear the end of snide dog show comments from Willis, not this week, not next, not 4 years later.
And I was right. You give Willis a drum, he ain't likely to ever stop beatin' it. God Bless ol' Will, one of the few sumbitches left what truly don't give half-a-damn.

But, of course, Border Collies and Aussies (and the rest of the world's cool dogs - bulldogs, rottis, labs of every hue, etc) never make it out of their Semifinal, "best in Group," into the prestigious finals, or "best in show."
(And yes, Best In Show is, by far, the funniest pseudo-documentry this side of Spinal Tap (though some of Jerry Falwell's efforts on Vince Foster were hilarious, too). We don't have to discuss it here)
The Finals are always a collection of hysterically gay poodles, barely ambulatory poofballs, dreary footstool-sized creatures and one or two tall, akward breeds that look like the just want a private place to pee. You can root for the occasional Basset Hound that breaks through to this level, but it will invariably lose to some annoying near-cat.
Still, Westminster is fantastic TV, if only because the announcing team is always so exasperated at how great the dogs are. I've seen 4 consecutive years of it, and in each year the announcers declare the Finals to be, by far, the best selection of dogs in memory, with the EXPLICIT caveat that such wonderful quality hasn't been present in previous years.
They're like Olympic gymnastic announcers in an Olympics boycotted by everybody except the US.
And it's their show, their world, their dogs, so i'm fine with it.

So Tuesday (Feb 15) is the second and final night, featuring Best In Show (at the end, obviously) but much more importantly, earlier in the night, the Best In Group for Herding dogs.
Good-v-Evil. Hate-v-Love. Us-V-Them. Mine-V-Yours.
Aussie-V-Border.

I'll sell you the whole seat, but you'll ONLY NEED THE EDGE!!!!!

Football - Cajun recruits

Apparently, when it comes to recruits with a cajun flavor, LSU can't be stopped. As our Texas readership can confirm, LSU also grabbed Ryan Perriloux, a copiously talented quarterback who for the last year had seemed pledged to Texas. Why Perriloux changed his mind would be an interesting story, though its always dangerous to care too much about recruits in general, particularly considering that of all the schools in all the land, LSU looks like one where Perriloux is most redundunt.
Jamarcus Russell (shockingly out of date page) was the part-time starter and occassional crunch-time finisher at QB for LSU last year as a freshman. He beat Oregon State pretty much by himself to open the season. I saw him play probably 3 times, splitting time with Marcus Randall, and he looked like both the most dominant player on the field in terms of speed, arm, size and all that and also the least sure what to do. I remember thinking that if he could get a handle on his job, LSU might be unbeatable. When he was on, like in the OSU comeback, he was The Deal, untackleable, fast and agile, and great with his arm.
His stats nearly equal LSU's starter, with equal TDs and fewer INTs.
He was Vince Young plus an arm, or everything Perriloux is supposed to be. And he should go into the season next year as the starter as a sophomore.

So why would Perriloux want to step into a three-year wait, when, if he'd gone to Texas (and Young bails after next year), he would have had a look at starting the '07 opener?

Or, put another way, who has more chance to get broken - Jamarcus Randall, a drop back passer with LSU's line, or Vince Young on any of the countless tuck-and-run missions Greg Davis is certain to send him on? Hell, Perriloux might have brought the Horns out in September next year.