There have been movies throughout the hundred year history of cinema that have taken their place in the pantheon of great art. Films like Casablanca, Raging Bull, Network or Citizen Kane.
This diary isn't about those. This diary is about the garbage.
Other films of dubious quality survive precisely because they are disasters. Watching these flicks is like rubbernecking on the freeway. You know you shouldn't look, but you can't turn away. These films are certainly enjoyable, but for all the wrong reasons.
Robert Altman once said that he learned more from bad films than good ones, because he learned what not to do. With that in mind, let the learning begin.
The civil right's era had many, many heroes, some of which don't get the credit they deserve. Some of which have receded to the background of our history, despite the large role they played in that history.
Mildred Loving was one of those. She, the black wife of a white man, who took her case against the Commonwealth of Virginia for the right to be so all the way to the Supreme Court, and won.
She died Friday from undisclosed reasons. She was 68.
Speaking slowly, so that the slower among us might understand, is difficult in blog form. Yet, if I were in a room with Paul Krugman right now, I would elongate every vowel, like I was speaking to an especially stupid child.
Now, I like Paul Krugman. He's one of the left's strongest allies. But he has gone off the deep end when it comes to Obama. His support of Clinton is so thorough that he is unable to see the forest for the trees.
Sir Elton John’s recent performance at a fund-raising event for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has drawn a formal complaint from Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group.
Mr. John, a foreign national, cannot under federal law make any contribution to a federal, state or local election campaign. The group, in a letter from its president, Tom Fitton, described Mr. John’s appearance at the fund-raiser as an “in-kind contribution from a foreign national.”
There is no love lost for Hillary Clinton around these parts. Most of our Clinton backing compatriots have fatuously gone on strike (one assumes myDD is providing their lost blogging income so that they can continue eating). I have always tried to be a straight shooter when it comes to the Primary Wars. I support Obama, but my support has always been soft, as Edwards was my first choice. However, it is now obvious that Hillary Clinton has no shot at the nomination, outside of a coup by superdelegates, so we should all be Obama supporters now. Still, I can understand why Hillary Clinton continues on. She has a shot, and you can't win if you don't keep running. Her supporters agree.
While I was watching Countdown tonight, RIchard Wolffe made an interesting point, one which I think is not only brilliant, but would satisfy both the Obama and Clinton camps, both of whom want to win.
U.S. President George W. Bush got an earful on Thursday about problems and progress in Afghanistan where a war has dragged on for more than six years but been largely eclipsed by Iraq...
"I must say, I'm a little envious," Bush said. "If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed."
"It must be exciting for you ... in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You're really making history, and thanks," Bush said.
There are times when President Bush says things that are so brain-bendingly stupid that they drive me beyond mere offense and into a universe of disgust unheard of among feeling people. That a Commander in Chief of the United States military can be so callous, and so wrong, about war defies all notions of logic and decency.
Did you think this was going to be easy? I know Obama supporters got that false sense of security during their run of wins, but Hillary Clinton is far too savvy a politician to go away without a fight. She has shown herself time and again to be a political Lazarus, and more vicious than a cornered badger when her back is against the wall.
But don't spend your time feeling sorry for yourself and your candidate. I thought your motto was "Yes We Can."
If there is one thing that the Democrats have over the Republicans, it is that for the past twenty-four years we have had a lock on terrible candidates. It's an inherent bi-product of who we are as Democrats; we are the party of ideas and thoughtfulness. We are the party of optimism, and we, as the Democratic base, tend to expect that the rest of the American electorate will be just as in love with wonky substance as we are. Ergo, we run candidates like Mondale, Dukakis, Gore and Kerry. Each were brilliant men and would have made fantastic presidents, but each were cerebral and stiff (yes, even Gore, who had the life poll-tested right out of him). While we, as thinking Democrats, like cerebral, cerebral doesn't win elections. People don't vote with their heads, they vote with their hearts.
So, we've all seen that horrible "Behind the Music" Clinton ad. You know the one. OK fine, have a yuk on me.
Terrible. However, I got to thinking, if Clinton wanted to make a decent ad that targeted my generation, what should she do? This naked pander obviously wasn't going to work. What would? Below you will find my script for a better Clinton ad.
I love violent movies. Give me splatter and gore and all manner of mayhem. The craft it takes to make viscera look real fascinates me. I don’t cotton to the sanitized, Michael Bay, PG-13, spasm-and-fall-when-shot violence. Give me the Grand Guignol. “I want,” as Arlo Guthrie once said, “to see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth.”
Now, I know some of you are asking yourselves, “What the hell is wrong with this sicko?” Let me assure you, I do not enjoy these moments in film because they give me some cheap thrill, like a snuff film. The Saw films all have plenty of gore, and I find them repugnant. The recent spate of torture-porn exploitations may not sanitize their violence but they certainly glorify it, which is almost worse.
According to the AP, the FCC has leveled a 1.43 million dollar fine at ABC over a five year old episode of NYPD Blue. What could possibly be so awful, so indecent, as to warrant a fine so hefty?
I cannot watch the Republican debates. My blood pressure runs too high, and I'm afraid I might die of an aneurysm. They are brain-bendingly stupid, all the way down to Alan Keyes. However, I do derive some pleasure from knowing that these men, old and grizzled and religiously crazy and mormon, will have to face one of our candidates. Any of our top candidates will trounce all any of their candidates next year.
Look at the policies these morons are espousing. Are any of them different then Bush? All of the top tier of candidates in the Republican field run either with Bush on almost all of the issues, or to the right of Bush. It's completely ridiculous, considering that Bush is both the worst and least popular president of all time. He's at thirty percent or below in every single poll.
Yet, it's not so ridiculous if we consider who makes up that thirty percent. They are the rabid, hardcore Republican partisans - the Kool-Aid drinkers. To them, Bush did everything right. They are also the base of the GOP, and if they make up thirty percent of the nation at large they must make up a pretty good chunk of the primary voters. That is why I see no difference between the Republican field and George Bush.
If you see a movie trailer in which nobody speaks except a narrator it is because the movie advertised is in a foreign language. When marketing foreign language films for American audiences studios always try to hide the fact that audiences will have to read subtitles. Every time I go to a foreign film that gets a lot of exposure, I know unsuspecting audience member who didn’t do their homework will bitch and moan that they have to read at the movies. Horror of horrors. I always say the same thing to these people. “If you don’t like it, there’s the door.” Subtitles do not bother me. Ignorant and rude moviegoers do.
So I hope your not afraid of subtitles, because tonight’s list is all foreign language films.
M. Night Shyamalan has gone from the Golden Boy of Hollywood to the butt of its jokes, all because he made a habit of finishing his films with twist endings. Instead of being surprising, like a good twist should be, the endings of his later films were gimmicky. Everybody knew a twist was coming, whether they knew what the twist was or not, and so they lost most, if not all, of their power.
However, there was nothing gimmicky about the ending of Shyamalan's first film, The Sixth Sense. Today the film suffers from being a cultural touchstone, so most know the ending in advance, but those of us who had the pleasure of seeing it in the theater remember what a shock the ending was. It was everything a good twist should be; it was impossible to figure out before it arrived, and it changed the entire movie, making you want to see it again immediately.
Tonight's FNatM focuses on flicks with great twist endings, but I have one ground rule before we begin. Please, avoid all spoilers in the comments if possible.
I left the last diary on a cruel cliffhanger, and for the kossacks who read this series regularly, I apologize for the long delay in bringing you the conclusion. I just had to be in the right frame of mind to tell this one. Up until now I've tried to keep some sense of levity about my war diaries, but there is no humor in this one. This one haunts me.
We pulled away from the sight of the ambush with itchy trigger fingers. If there is force willing to mount a reasonably straightforward attack on a platoon of U.S. Marines in a war where that tactic was not in fashion, chances are there is another waiting somewhere nearby.
I believe in the intrinsic worth of all human beings, even if they don't deserve it.
I believe there are no such things as "inalienable rights." Our rights are very alienable and the government has been trying to alienate them ever since we gained them. Our rights were hard one and hard kept through blood and sweat and pain, and it is incumbent upon all of us to keep an eye on those that would strip them from us.
I just missed the Great Candidate Wars of '03-'04. I do not know what kind of talking points people used against Edwards, or Kerry, or Dean, or Gephardt for that matter. However, if they were anything like this year's wars, I have an idea.
If candidate supporters are to be believed, none of our nominees are experienced enough, or smart enough, or genuine enough, or pure enough. They are all sleaze buckets who cannot win in the general election. They all flipped on the war, or voted for bad trade agreements, or talk about Social Security like the Repubs, or have seen UFO's, or talk to fucking much (Biden, I'm looking at you). Then there's Gravel and Richardson.
All of these are fair points one can use to decide who one will vote for, or conversely, not vote for. We have levied accusations such as these (well, maybe not the UFO thing) against candidates, both better and worse, for a long time.
Still, there is one talking point among the diaries that I have thought about a lot. People levy it at Clinton supporters, particularly female Clinton supporters. "If you vote for HIllary because she's a woman, you're not a feminist." I have to say, that's a load of bunk.
At the end of the last diary in the series, I promised to tell a tale about how filthy war is. I will get to that, as it's a pretty funny story. But today, I want to jump about a year ahead. I told all of you how bad I was in the band, as my whole enlistment in the program was predicated on a lie, and after I returned from Iraq the first time, I had no more chops on the clarinet. I managed to move, by sheer luck, to Combat Camera. While being in the Marine Corps was still a bad fit for me, being a videographer was not.
So, when I left for my second tour I left with an entirely different unit. Combat Cameramen are still POG's (person other than grunt), but they end up attached to the real thing. I was surrounded by crude, foulmouthed, angry grunts. While I saw no combat with the band, I saw more than I wanted to with these guys.
