O Holy Snap, Yo!

I live!

2008-09-17T11:14:00.001-07:00

This is one of the best political ads I have ever seen.

I really do intend to start posting here more often. I promise.

Law Roolz.

2008-06-25T14:16:00.000-07:00

An extraordinary speech by Chris Dodd.

Take my advice: read the text version, rather than watching the video. His delivery leaves much to be desired. But the speech itself is fairly astonishing. If I were a member of his Senatorial constituency, I'd be damn proud today.

See? Alberto J. Mora gets it!

2008-06-17T11:38:00.000-07:00

Former Navy general counsel Alberto J. Mora, in a statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee: ". . .our Nation's policy decision to use so-called 'harsh' interrogation techniques during the War on Terror was a mistake of massive proportions. . . . This interrogation policy -- which may aptly be labeled a 'policy of cruelty' -- violated our founding values, our constitutional system and the fabric of our laws, our over-arching foreign policy interests, and our national security. . . . The United States was founded on the principle that every person -- not just each citizen -- possesses certain inalienable rights that no government, including our own, may violate."

He'd probably punch me if I hugged him. Oh well.

Hey, whaddaya know?

2008-06-13T06:55:00.000-07:00

A victory for the rule of law. How 'bout that.

And I actually do think it's appropriate to put things in such stark terms. (Here's where I get all twinkly-eyed and ridiculous. Just a warning.)

When I was a kid, reading in school about presidents and Congresses and courts and all that, and history, I used to wonder - occasionally out loud - what stopped this or that president from just unilaterally overruling laws and court decisions he didn't like. Like, for example, I used to wonder why, during the 60s, John Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson didn't just say, "Oh, we'll not be having any of that segregation stuff anymore," and send the friggin' Army in to stop people from mistreating black people. Or, when I read about impeachment, about how the Congress could basically fire the president, I used to wonder what would stop the president from just saying, "Nope, I think I'll stay president." When a president had served his two terms and it came time to elect someone else, who could stop him from deciding he wanted to stay president? Who, I wondered, was going to stop him? He doesn't have a boss, in the vertical, linear sense. And nobody else in the country gets to have direct authority over the military. What stops a president from doing whatever he wants? Doesn't he basically rule the country?

Reading about and wondering about this crap, I eventually found my way to a couple of really elusive, ethereal concepts that I was terrified to discover basically amount to the entire fabric of constitutional democracy. The first is the concept of checks-and-balances, which is to say that the branches of government (the executive, the legislative, and the judicial, plus the unofficial fourth branch, the free press) are each others' bosses and each others' employees, at the same time. The other concept is even more frustrating: the concept that neither the Congress, nor the presidency, nor the courts actually rules the United States. What rules the United States - what unites them and has sovereignty over them - is Constitutional law. And the three branches of government are servants of the Constitution. Congress addresses contemporary issues by adapting the Constitution into practical legislation; the Executive enforces and upholds that legislation and defends it from the outside; the Judiciary ensures that neither the legislation nor the execution of it conflict with the Constitution. The word "Constitution" isn't what I thought it was when I was a kid: a fancy-sounding, archaic, meaningless word that basically means, "Really Important Old Piece of Paper." It means what it says: the Constitution constitutes the United States. The United States are made of the Constitution.

Of course, the Constitution is, literally, an old piece of parchment. It doesn't rule anything. So that queasy feeling you might get from thinking about this stuff might come from the fact that this blog post is a pedantic, intellectual, silly waste of time - or it might be the quiet background realization that the sovereignty of Constitutional law in this country basically boils down to an uneasy and mostly-unenforceable agreement between very powerful, very ambitious parties, any of whom could decide to test the limits of their authority at any time. This danger is embodied by the presidency: it's an office occupied by one single person, and awarded by a process that weeds out everyone but the very most single-minded, ambitious, power-hungry, obsessive lunatics in the world. And, it's an office that gives this single-minded, ambitious, power-hungry, obsessive lunatic authority over the military, the police, the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet, foreign-policymaking, and last but not least, the ability to unilaterally veto legislation on a whim. If any branch of the government were to say, "Yeah, this democracy stuff is nice, but I've decided to cancel it and give all the power to myself," it'd be the Executive branch, if only because the president doesn't really have to compromise with anybody, when you get right down to it.

But that gets me thinking about other ways in which the fabric of our society is held together by nothing more than the good faith, goodwill, and - to a depressingly large extent - inertia of individuals. If the president gives a direct order to a soldier, that soldier must obey it, says the law. But what enforces that law? The soldier has a gun, and in most cases the president doesn't. If that soldier says no, he's not going to follow that order, the law says that soldier must be arrested. If that soldier says no, he's not going to allow himself to be arrested today, what's left? Force? Getting a bigger gun? More guns than he's got? Holy shit-balls, why isn't this country ruled by roving bands of renegade soldiers, taking whatever they want? Why aren't we in a military dictatorship?

To a large extent, democratic society holds together for no greater reason than that people have a distaste for warring over every little damned thing we don't like doing. But no, things really aren't that bleak and inhuman. To an even larger extent, democratic society holds together because we just kind of have an innate sense that it has to. It should. Because we people have evolved over the centuries an understanding that ultimately, the reality that we all have to make sacrifices in order to have the peaceful, prosperous, comfortable lives we want is inescapable. Either we can make those sacrifices peacefully, by participating in a herky-jerky, wildly imperfect, bottomlessly messy democratic society that as often as not yields results that will bitterly disappoint us... or we can make those sacrifices violently, by living brutish, dangerous, blood-soaked, spiritually empty lives trying to have exactly what we want at any given moment. And, the peaceful option works better - because the secret, the ingenious subtlety that tends to hold things together, is that ultimately, all anyone really wants is peace and a sense that the world operates justly. And that reality - the paradoxical and endlessly frustrating reality that in order to have peace and justice, we can never have everything that we want, even if all we want is peace and justice all the time - applies to everyone. Even presidents.

Which, ultimately, is what this most recent Supreme Court ruling is about. Law rules, because when we 'Mericans are forced to make a decision, we tend to prefer the benevolent and cooperative sloppiness of law's rule to the horrifying and chaotic void of autocracy. And I know "autocracy" is a scary and loaded word, conjuring up images of storm troopers and thought police and rigid control, and I know the Bush administration has never lived up to these nightmare images. I'm not using that word accidentally, but literally. Autocracy denotes, quite simply, a society in which authority is consolidated in a single person. Not in a single elected office, but in a single person - and that's an important distinction. An office - even one held by a single person - has abstract but defined boundaries. When authority is consolidated in a person, rather than in an office, that individual person's whims are unbound by law. And it's neither an exaggeration nor a political attack to say that the Bush administration has advanced an autocratic notion of government since 9/11: their basic message has been that these are extraordinary times, requiring the president to be able to act quickly and unilaterally as he - and no one else - sees fit. They've advanced the notion that when existing law conflicts with the president's agenda - his self-appointed mission - his personal authority trumps the existing law.

Think about how dangerous this notion is. Suppose Barack Obama turns out to be a secret Maoist? Suppose John McCain decides he wants to lob hydrogen bombs at China, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela? Just because we might agree with a particular president's agenda doesn't change the fact that it's unforgivably irresponsible to hand over unchecked authority to him. Many of the same folks who supported George W. Bush's attempts at claiming boundless executive power would likely feel quite differently if the next president decided to use the term "enemy combatant" on, say, Christians, and ship us all off to Guantanamo Bay for some "enhanced interrogation techniques."

Which is why we have a Supreme Court: they take all this in, review it, and give it a resounding thumbs-down. (Actually, not so resounding: a 5-4 decision is hardly a thunderous statement.) There's no small amount of irony to it, either: the very least democratic branch of government - justices aren't democratically elected but rather appointed, serve for life, and are not accountable for their decisions - strikes a staggering haymaker for the rule of law. I'll take it.

Oh, so NOW he's a bad guy...

2008-05-22T14:20:00.000-07:00

Evidence of the vital importance of Jewish voters in the upcoming presidential election: John McCain wouldn't reject John Hagee's endorsement when he found out Hagee called the Roman Catholic Church the "great whore," wouldn't reject Hagee's endorsement when he said Hurricane Katrina was an act of God's retribution, but he rejects his endorsement now, over a nearly 20-year-old sermon about Adolf Hitler.

Look, obviously the stuff Hagee said about Hitler - that Hitler was carrying out God's work of driving the Jews to Israel - is insane, offensive, horrible, and utterly intolerable. And, yes, on a measure, it has to be considered worse than what he said about the Church, at least. But why is it OK for Hagee to suggest that God likes to wipe out poor black people in the Mississippi River delta, but not OK for Hagee to suggest that God likes to wipe out Jews?

The point I'm trying to make here is not that Hurricane Katrina and the Holocaust are in any way equal, because they're not. Nor am I trying to suggest that McCain shouldn't have rejected Hagee's endorsement, because he absolutely should have. I'm just saying I'm awfully disappointed that he didn't get around to it until now. The time to reject John Hagee was back when he first endorsed McCain - why didn't he do it then?

Well, I've got a (very dispiriting) theory about it. Back when Hagee endorsed McCain, McCain was still trying to sew up the Republican nomination and needed as much support from far-right Protestant ~~nutjobs~~ voters as he could get. More importantly, back then the Democrats were still thickly embroiled in their own nominating battle and had neither the political capital nor the time to sharply criticize McCain for accepting the endorsement of a fringe anti-Catholic bigot who likes to preach that one of the worst mass murderers in human history was an instrument of God's hand. Now, of course, the Democratic nominating process is perceived to be all but technically over, so McCain's new focus is to try to beat Barack Obama to the political middle. One thing he definitely cannot bring with him on this trip is an affiliation with a guy who thinks Adolf Hitler was doing God's work. Now it's politically expedient to ditch Hagee. Now there's political capital to be gained by stridently renouncing his particular brand of lunacy.

One of the groups of voters that sits squarely in the political middle - that turf McCain and Obama will be clawing to reach between now and November - is American Jews. Generally speaking, they're profiled as being progressive on most social issues but leaning hard to the right on one particular issue: the security of Israel. So, how does this play for McCain? On the one hand, no rational person, no matter how grateful they are for Israel's existence, would say that Adolf Hitler did a good thing by damn near exterminating the entire Jewish diaspora. And remember, Hagee said Hitler did God's work, and God's work is always good, right? On the other hand, Hagee is also one of the United States' most prominent and fanatical supporters of Israel - the term "Christian Zionist" was practically coined in reference to him.

And, on the third hand (use your imagination), doesn't it just kind of seem absurd that McCain's camp is claiming they didn't know Hagee was a lunatic back when they accepted his endorsement? What, they don't have a single person on the entire campaign whose job it is to make sure the candidate doesn't publicly and proudly accept the endorsements of fringe lunatics whose positions are repugnant to damn near the entire world?

The reality is, I suspect, that McCain's camp had a pretty good idea this stuff was true about Hagee back when he endorsed McCain. And, because they're mostly savvy people who know their way around a campaign, they knew it would eventually come out, and that when it did, McCain would have to renounce Hagee. But they went ahead and made a show of accepting the endorsement anyway. Because at the time, it was politically valuable: it gave McCain a foothold with the Christian right, and by refusing to reject Hagee's endorsement when his offensive statements about the world's largest Church and one of its oldest and greatest institutions came to light, McCain could also pump a little more air into his "maverick" persona. John McCain for President in 2008: Right-Wingers Like Him, And He Also Don't Back Down For No Man!

And now, there's even more political capital to be wrung out of Hagee - political capital that wouldn't have been available if McCain had rejected him back when the party nominations were still the primary focus, rather than the general election run-to-the-center bonanza. Now, McCain can distance himself from the religious right exactly at the moment that he's trying to endear himself to the independent and moderate voters he'll be courting in the fall... and by rejecting the endorsement of a prominent conservative, he can pump yet more air into his "maverick" persona.

Look. Here's where I'd say something conciliatory and moderate about how this kind of manipulation and cynicism isn't a characteristic solely of McCain but rather of the sick political culture in this country. Or something about how all politicians do it. But the thing is, this is characteristic of McCain, even if it's also a regular feature of our diseased political culture. The media cut McCain a lot of slack because he feeds them quotes and cultivates friendships in the press, but this is the same guy who raked the Bush administration over the coals for the war in Iraq before pulling a complete 180 and raving about what a great success it's been. Remember his infamous tour of Baghdad, the one after which he said the city was perfectly safe for a stroll, only it turned out he was surrounded by more military security than the friggin' White House the entire time? That was John McCain, playing the game. The administration needed one of its prominent critics - the "maverick" with the reputation for integrity and honesty - to get on board with the troop surge so Fox News could beat their drums and let the air out of the anti-war movement. McCain needed to get his toe in the door with conservatives so he could start financing his presidential campaign early. So they cut a deal. Just like he cut deals a thousand other times. Just like the thousand other times he talked big, called out members of his own party, made a big deal of being the guy who was Bigger Than Partisanship, and then rolled right the hell over when it came time to put some actual action behind it.

The truth is, John McCain's got all the integrity in the world, right up until he spots something he needs, and then all those much-discussed convictions go flying right the hell out the window. He couldn't sell himself out quickly enough once this presidential campaign got tough. And every step of the way, he's worked the sniveling, buddy-buddy, lapdog media like a damn hand-puppet, and they've been all-too happy to comply. When it got tough to raise funds for his campaign, he sold off campaign jobs to powerful lobbyists. When he got busted for having a campaign full of lobbyists while presenting himself as the anti-special-interest candidate, he instituted a new "ethics" rule that led to the shit-canning of all the lobbyists on his campaign... and what did the media do? Not a damned thing, except maybe go another round of selling John McCain as the guy who's so opposed to special interests, he gutted his own campaign just to clean it of the stain of lobbyists. And pump a little more air into his "maverick" persona.

Recognize the pattern? You ought to. He's been at it for decades. Sell out early, then rebound by working the media. Or work the media early, and sell out later.

Ongoing (Scaled-Back, Perfunctory) Feature!

2008-04-29T07:24:00.000-07:00

More Netflix Movie Reviews!

In advance: I'm sorry. Not all movies are going to motivate me to write extended, sprawling, rambling reviews. Maybe that's a good thing. I swear I'm going to get back to writing serious entries. After we move, when I've got a tad bit more time to actually, y'know, think about things.

Dave Chappelle: Killin' Them Softly

This is the great stand-up routine at Washington's historic Lincoln Theater, the one that really seemed to kick Dave Chappelle's career into high-gear. I remarked to my wife that it's amazing to watch that routine, which is eight years old now and features a Dave Chappelle who's much rougher around the edges than the guy who left Chappelle's Show and put together the block party in Harlem. It's amazing because, funny as the stand-up routine is, he gets away with a ton simply because of his innate likability. The first half of the routine plays almost like someone doing a parody of the rote, by-the-book, utterly uninspired typical cookie-cutter Def Comedy Jam stand-up comic: "Black people are like this; white people are like that! And women are all, blah blah blah feelings feelings feelings!" This type of comedy is rarely funny or well-observed, and truth be told, many of the jokes in the first half of this Chappelle routine earn nothing better than a mild, appreciative chuckle (from me and my wife, that is, and not so much the audience, who could scarcely laugh harder without dying in the aisles). But damn if I didn't enjoy the hell out of it, just as much as I did back in 2000 when it first appeared on HBO, and the reason is simple: Dave Chappelle is just an insanely, impossibly likable guy. When he kicked up the self-deprecation and the energy level in the second half of the routine, he had us dying on our couch. I could go into greater detail about which bits worked the best, but I'm not going to. This is a fun stand-up comedy show, and like Jim Gaffigan's Beyond the Pale, it gets better as it goes along. I recommend it.

Shaolin Soccer

Really funny, really silly, and occasionally truly inspired in a surreal, mind-blowingly random way. The sudden, spontaneous group-dance scene outside of the bun stand is an example of this. Another example would be the scene that made me laugh so hard I nearly vomited out my lungs: when the female love-interest goes to a beauty parlor to have her hair and ghastly skin condition addressed, and the woman comes out to greet her at the door. I'm not going to spoil the joke. See it for yourself. Stephen Chow is awesome, and is officially one of my favorite actor-directors alive, even if it turns out the rest of his movies suck ass.

Ongoing (Possibly Semi-Regular, Probably Not) Feature!

2008-04-21T08:17:00.001-07:00

Netflix Movie Reviews!

So my wife and I got our second batch of Netflix movies this past weekend. I could get used to this whole Netflix thing, I tell you: even the bad movies (Transformers) are redeemed somewhat by the fun of getting movies in the mail and not having to worry about returning them on time. Plus, how bad would a film have to suck to make it a waste of money, when I'm paying something less than a dollar per?

Fortunately, this past weekend's batch did nothing to answer that question. Pardon me if my reviews are slightly less-thorough than the Transformers review: I don't feel quite as strongly one way or the other about either of this batch's selections as I did about that heaping mound of shit.

Super Troopers

This is one of those movies (along with several others) that people have been pushing on me and the missus: "Oh my God, you haven't seen Super Troopers? You have to see Super Troopers!" Now we've seen Super Troopers. And liked it! You can never really go wrong with an unambitious low-budget goofball ensemble comedy, especially when it prominently features characters with bushy mustaches (the mustaches make almost everything the characters say funny, even if it's not really supposed to be).

The Broken Lizard guys seem totally relaxed with each other and perfectly comfortable with their characters, and that goes a long way in any comedy. Super Troopers has an interesting tone: a handful of moments are overtly, demonstratively comedic, while most of the movie is so laid-back and deadpan that it's hard to tell if you're laughing because what you're watching is comedy, or laughing because the actors are keeping straight faces while speaking with those awesome mustaches. Even moments of absurdity, like the spontaneous out-of-control fist-fights that break out a couple of times in the film, are not set up or presented as punchlines. Oddly, they're not delivered as deadpan parody of the maverick-cop genre either. They kinda just happen on-screen: the characters get testy, start fighting each other in a not-at-all-realistic way, and if you think it's funny, hey, that's cool, but if not, hey, that's cool too. I found myself glad for this odd approach, if only because Super Troopers had been built up as such an all-time classic sleeper comedy and probably couldn't have lived up to its hype no matter what: the laid-back style of the film got rid of all the pressure to find it hilarious, and actually made it easier to laugh.

The troupe probably doesn't get as much mileage out of the film's concept as they could have. Another route to go might have been to make the protagonist a straight character who's unfamiliar with the titular state troopers, rather than showing the action from the perspective of the troopers themselves. The way the movie's made, there's no normal perspective who looks at the wacky state troopers and their hyper-macho local rivals and goes, "What the fuck's wrong with all the cops around here?" It lets a little bit of the air out of some of the gags, since there's no character who establishes that the movie takes place in something like our real universe, where there are normal cops compared to whom these zany state troopers are, well, zany.

Then again, maybe centering the action on a straight character would have put too much pressure on the trooper characters to produce laughs every time they're on-screen, to justify the straight character's amazement or exasperation with them. No, now that I think about it, I think the Broken Lizard guys got it right: sure, the movie might not produce as many huge, laugh-out-loud moments as it could have, but it maintains that relaxed, casual vibe throughout, which lets some of the smaller moments shine. For example, I laughed for about five minutes after a moment when Jay Chandrasekhar's character simply cuts open a plastic-wrapped brick of marijuana, lifts some of the contents to his nose, and says very seriously, "Reefer." There's nothing especially comedic about the moment, but the combination of his seriousness, the specific word he uses ("Pot," or "ganja," or "weed," or "Mary Jane," or pretty much any other name for marijuana wouldn't have been nearly as funny, for whatever reason), and his ridiculous Magnum P.I. mustache make it a genuinely funny moment in that humble, low-key way that characterizes this whole film.

Super Troopers is a film seemingly designed to give viewers quotes they can hit each other with down the road for instant laughs. "I don't want a large Farva, I want a goddamn liter o' cola!" "Littering AND... littering AND... littering AND... smokin' the reefer." "How's the view from sugar heaven, bitch?" And so forth. Out of context, they're not funny. Actually, in context, they're not exactly drop-dead hilarious. They're good for a chuckle. Except that somehow, down the line, they get funnier, even when you didn't laugh that hard the first time. I suspect that Super Troopers itself is that way, too, which would give it something in common with The Big Lebowski. The first time I watched The Big Lebowski, I laughed a couple of times. The fifty-sixth time I watched The Big Lebowski, I almost died when The Dude says, "This will not stand, man! This aggression will not stand, man!" Just like I almost died the previous fifty-three or so times I watched it. It's a good quality for a movie to have in the age of DVDs: I've seen all or parts of The Big Lebowski probably a hundred times in my life. I'm betting I'll see Super Troopers again, too. Man, I'm a loser.

If I had an established four-star system for rating films, Super Troopers would be a textbook example of a three-star comedy. Its utter lack of ambition or pretense and the casual, tossed-off approach to most of the material make it ineligible for a fourth star, but at the same time it achieves everything it sets out to do, and what it sets out to do is something worth doing in the first place. Good on ya, Broken Lizard dudes. No effing way I'll watch either of your other movies, though. Sorry.

Superbad

Yep, it was Super Week back at the ranch this, uh, week. Quite accidentally, we got two Netflix movies with "Super" in the title, and somehow neither of them was a superhero movie.

Okay, so, I'm a busy guy. I started this post about a week ago and I'm only just now getting to the second paragraph of the Superbad review. Problem is, although I still remember the film itself fairly well (it's that one with Christopher Reeve in a blue leotard, right?), I'm no longer flush with feeling about it. That's too bad, because I remember being very flush with goodwill toward this one in the immediate aftermath of watching it for the first time.

Superbad was very good (Supergood? No, I'm not going there - I have some dignity, at least). Michael Cera was heartbreakingly sweet and believable and really commanded the movie as Evan. There's a scene toward the end [SPOILER-LIKE MATERIAL FOLLOWS] where the girl he's got a very innocent, starry-eyed kid-crush on is drunk out of her mind and trying to seduce him, and he's not ready to let go of that part of his childhood yet, and all he wants to do is tell her how he feels about her but he's too drunk to really put it together into words and the best he can do is to tell her how pretty she is over and over again, and the whole thing is moving too fast for him... I got all choked up during this scene, and my poor wife (we're married) had to hear me say, "Don't do it, Evan! Noooo!" about ten times. [END SPOILERS - FOR NOW]

Jonah Hill, who's always marvelous, was marvelous as the crude, selfish, cynical, hilariously myopic Seth, who's the catalyst for virtually all of the conflict in the film and only really comes around at the very end. There's a kind of cruel fairness to how his story unfolds: [MORE SPOILERS] he spends most of the film's running time in a desperate, all-consuming, dignity-destroying quest for alcohol, believing the only way he'll have a shot with his dream girl is if they're both shit-faced drunk. He's cruel and manipulative to his friends, he puts them in actual danger, he shits all over them when they don't comply with his wishes, all for the precious booze he figures he'll need to make the night go his way. Then, when he's got his dream girl alone and puts the moves on her, she rebuffs him... because he's drunk, and she doesn't drink. It's poignant, sad, and brightly ironic: his entire concept of the dynamic between him and this girl turns out to be mostly imaginary. He thinks she's the sexy party girl and he's the dorky fat guy and the only shot he's got is if they're both drunk and uninhibited and he's the hero who supplied the booze for her party; in reality, she likes him a lot, isn't really a party girl, and she prefers him when he's sober. [END SPOILERS]

Of course, these elements, taken out of context, probably make the film sound like an extended After School Special about why underage drinking, or underage sex, or underage delinquency is baaaaad. I don't think that's what the filmmakers are after, although it's hard to miss that the film quite clearly seems to have the perspective that alcohol, sex, and teenagers do not mix well. Superbad is first and foremost a raunchy comedy, and a very funny one. Christopher Mintz-Plasse is, surprisingly, as good as the hype in the scene-stealing McLovin role, and Seth Rogen and Bill Hader are hysterically funny as two delinquent police officers. Cera and Hill are, of course, funny as hell too.

What I think I liked the very most about Superbad is something it shares with the other two films I lump in with it to form a sort of Judd Apatow-Seth Rogen trilogy: The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up. That is, all three of these movies are very raunchy, very irreverent comedies, but in each case there's an undercurrent of real respect for the important life changes the characters are going through. Virgin is full of jokes about Andy's virginity, but the fear, confusion, vulnerability, and trust involved in his journey to losing it are honestly and respectfully depicted. When he finally gets to the point where he's willing to be that intimate with the right person, it is depicted as a good and admirable decision, and his rough journey is shown to have been deservedly rewarding. Similarly, Knocked Up is brimming with humor about relationships, sex, marriage, and of course pregnancy, but the characters are allowed to be believably frightened, frustrated, and hopeful. They are shown rising to become their best selves, and their best selves are shown to be basically good, loving, genuine people.

I loved that same quality in Superbad. I could go on and on about the deficiencies in most - hell, virtually all - teen comedies (insofar as this movie could be considered a teen comedy - it's about teenagers, sure, but it clearly comes from adults and also seems to speak most clearly to adults), but instead I'm just going to recommend that you watch the execrable Can't Hardly Wait instead, a film that cheats by depicting the childlike sincerity, sensitivity, and feverish intensity of some teenagers and the myopia, selfishness, and immaturity of others without ever honestly examining the fact that all teenagers overflow with all of the above (actually, don't watch Can't Hardly Wait. Just take my word that it's shit. I wouldn't wish that hunk of garbage on anyone). Superbad, on the other hand, gets tons of laughs out of teenage characters being every bit as stupid, immature, short-sighted, and desperate as they generally are - but it also wrings genuine emotion out of these same characteristics, as well as the innocence, romanticism, and confusion that are also inextricable parts of adolescence.

I could probably say a lot more about Superbad, but I'm going to stop now. I really, really liked this movie. My wife and I have a habit of watching (and here's where I out the both of us as big-time nerds) Jesus of Nazareth on DVD every few months or so; each and every time we watch it, after it ends, I find myself feeling genuinely sad that I can't watch, like, The Continued Adventures of Jesus of Nazareth, starring Robert Powell as Jesus. It's not that I want to watch Jesus of Nazareth again - it's very specifically that I want to watch more of the Jesus depicted in that great miniseries, I want to spend more time in that world, and I want the story to continue. (I'd imagine the Apostles probably felt the same way about the real guy. (When talking about Christ, is it more appropriate to refer to the "real guy" or the "Real Guy"?)) I felt similarly toward Superbad (which is about as different a film from Jesus of Nazareth as it can be, in terms of tone and style): I didn't want to watch Superbad again, necessarily, but I wanted to watch the ongoing story of Evan and Seth and their friendship. And that's not to say that the film seemed to end too soon, at all: actually, I felt like it ended at the exact right moment. This is a very good film, and I highly recommend it.

(Alright, fuck it: Superbad: it's Supergood!)

...it means, "Morals 'atter differ'nt 'n mine."

2008-04-17T11:17:00.000-07:00

I promise I'm not going to go too far in depth with today's post, because this is exactly the sort of topic to which I'd typically devote a gazillion words. And besides, Dan Froomkin already sorta covered it in his column from this afternoon.

Pope Benedict XVI is in town this week (in fact, my wife attended the Papal Mass at the Washington Nationals' new stadium this morning). President Bush rolled out the red carpet for him (literally), and as part of a ceremony on the White House lawn yesterday to celebrate the Pope's 81st birthday, he addressed both the public and the Holy Father and took an opportunity during his remarks to utter the following words to the Pope:

"In a world where some no longer believe that we can distinguish between simple right and wrong, we need your message to reject this dictatorship of relativism."

I talked to my wife yesterday morning - prior to this particular speech - about whether or not, on some basic level, George W. Bush kinda just doesn't get it. And, by "it," I mean, "pretty much anything." I don't intend to simply bash the man, because what I'm trying to get at here is an understanding of him as a human being and not as a political figure, or a symbol of an ideology, or certainly as a masthead of the human capacity for shittiness.

In George's mind, I think, there are two kinds of people: good guys, and bad guys. Good guys possess all the good qualities: moral clarity, a desire for peace and a will to work for it, a love of freedom and democracy, a loving and faithful heart, courage, perspective, etc. Bad guys possess absolutely none of these qualities. In George's mind, he's one of the good guys. Therefore, he possesses all the good-guy qualities. You see the weird-ass logic there? It's not that he's a good guy because he possesses all the qualities of goodness - no, he possesses all the qualities of goodness because he's a good guy. And by what measure is he a good guy? Simple: he's George Bush.

That's what I mean when I say that he doesn't get it.

What does this have to do with moral relativism?

Well, here's the thing. It's hard to get any more morally subjective than taking the position that a single temporal event - the terrorist attacks of 9/11, say - completely realigned the moral universe and gave rise to goals that justified absolutely any subversion of established morality in their pursuit. After all, if morals are absolute and objective, then they're not contextual, right? And if morals are not contextual, then the fact that we're "living in a post-9/11 world," as George and the members of his administration are fond of reminding us, doesn't do anything to change those morals, does it?

George Bush has started an elective war during his presidency. He's asserted that laws, statutes, treaties, and legal precedents can be selectively applied by the President, whose prerogatives in wartime trump all of them. His administration has taken the legal position that Americans are endowed with special rights that do not extend to the rest of the world's citizenry. He's asserted that the security of the United States takes precedence over questions of civility, morality, legality, and responsibility to the larger world community. And yet, there he was, standing next to the Pope, decrying the "dictatorship of relativism."

Aside from the obvious and bitterly ironic humor of George W. Bush lamenting the dangers of dictatorship, don't you get a strange sense of vertigo from hearing him talk about the evil of relativism? This is what makes me wonder if maybe he just sorta doesn't get it, in that particular Calvinist way of his (by which I mean that he seems to believe that goodness is an indivisible aspect of his being, neither arising from nor depending on his actions in any way, but rather an anointment from God). He thinks that moral clarity is the same thing as moral absolutism (he's close), but more importantly he thinks that he possesses either of those things, simply because he never checks or questions his own judgment. After all, moral clarity is what good guys have, and he's a good guy, so he must have moral clarity, right?

This whole thing gets at the essential weirdness of the Bush presidency - I almost don't want to use the word "weirdness" to describe something that has resulted in so much death. But it is weird: Bush himself seems so oblivious to the reality of his place in the world, to the consequences of his actions, to the relationship between the words we use and the reality we use them to describe, that he might almost be charming if he weren't also the holder of the most powerful office in the world.

I've lost my train of thought. I guess what I'm getting at is that the years of the Bush presidency have given me a new appreciation for the fact that words - individual words, each and every one of them - really do have specific meanings that are vitally important, and that shit gets awfully bizarre and unstructured when we lose track of those meanings. George and his administration have done so much to sap the meaning out of words like "freedom," "liberty," "justice," "democracy," and so on that nowadays when we hear these words spoken, they're almost totally meaningless - or worse, we understand them merely as political weapons designed to undercut opposition. After all, who could oppose this or that government initiative if it is undertaken in the name of freedom? What are you, anti-freedom?

We do so little to examine the very specific words that our public figures use. Eventually, through politicians' own careful and diligent use (and this is where I start to sound like a conspiracy theorist - I promise I'm not one, and I'm not describing a conspiracy here) of certain words and phrases, and through our and our media's passive acceptance of these terms, a web of perception is created. Because George W. Bush continually asserts that he is acting on moral clarity and clearly defined moral absolutes, continually characterizes his actions as prioritizing moral duty over political convenience, we gradually come to except this facade: George W. Bush is a man driven by a clear sense of moral obligation and purpose, as opposed to being, say, a narcissist with a dangerous belief that his choices are anointed the right ones simply because he's the one making them.

And that's how you end up with George W. Bush, the world's single most prominent moral relativist, standing at a podium and saying, with apparent and believable sincerity, that the world needs saving from the "dictatorship of relativism." It's how we end up with a guy who has capriciously started two disastrous wars and petulantly refused to end them in the face of overwhelming destruction and undeniable majority opposition, a guy who smugly ordered U.S. troops to capture Osama Bin Laden "dead or alive," a guy who presided over the most irresponsible and cavalier use of the death penalty in the United States during his tenure as governor of Texas, a guy who signed off on the executions of mentally retarded people and children and innocent men who'd been railroaded into wrongful convictions, bemoaning the modern world's callous disregard for human life.

Because he believes he's a good guy. And he believes good guys value human life and are committed to objective right and wrong. So he believes he values human life and is committed to objective right and wrong. Even when doesn't, and isn't.

It's interesting to see him standing next to the Pope. The Pope - this one in particular - is a man whose positions have a kind of unassailable consistency to them, even when they're hard to agree with, and they're backed up by a commitment. That's the kind of man Bush likes to claim to be, but in reality (it's what's behind that web of perception) he's actually a guy whose positions have absolutely no consistency except that he agrees with all of them, and the only thing he's committed to is resisting the idea that he's accountable to anyone.

Pope Benedict XVI is a man who, when he talks about God, is talking about a divine obligation that has demanded of him a life of chastity, humility, prayer, and constant self-sacrifice; an absolute commitment that he will never, ever get to equivocate his way out of; responsibility for a community of over a billion people that he cannot shy away from, even when it means enduring a hundred million Emperor Palpatine comparisons. When George W. Bush talks about God, he's talking about his own ego.

Wow, this post really went nowhere. Oh well. At least I got some thoughts down. I do have a job, you know.

New (Possibly Semi-Regular, Probably Not) Feature!

2008-04-14T11:09:00.000-07:00

Netflix Movie Reviews!

My (new) wife (we're newlyweds) (because we had a wedding) (in which we were married) (to each other) (by a priest) (we have certificates and everything!) and I recently subscribed to Netflix, thereby replacing my very expensive habit of buying DVDs and then realizing I don't really like them. You know how Netflix works: you make a list of movies, they send 'em to you in pairs (or in threes, if you splurged for a fancy deal), you watch 'em, you send 'em back, they send you some more. When I set up the account, I didn't have a ton of time - in fact, I was kinda rushed, because the wife and I were on our way out for a honeymoon date (because we were on our honeymoon) (because we're married) (to each other) - so when I had to pick six movies to start up the account, I just kinda picked six movies from the main page without paying too much attention to what I was selecting. That's how we ended up watching Transformers last night.

Transformers: The (Live-Action, Non-Nelson-Shin-Directed) Movie

There's a scene in A Fish Called Wanda in which Wanda, Jamie Lee Curtis's character, is trying to create a distraction that will get Michael Palin's character (Ken) out of her hair. I don't remember exactly why she needs him to be diverted out of the flat at that moment (for real, the plot of that movie is mad complicated, yo), only that she's improvising on the fly and doesn't have much to work with beyond her own wits and Ken's gullibility. She pretends she's on the phone, listening to someone say something shocking on the other end. As Ken watches, she says, with increasing hysteria, "Oh my God. OH MY GOD!" Then she hangs up the phone and yells, "Ken! Somebody just called!"

This scene was on my mind as I watched Transformers fly apart like a helicopter made of powdered sugar down the stretch last night. The movie went so far out of its way to create tension, drama, and noise where there shouldn't have been any that I started glancing nervously around the room, expecting to see Michael Bay sneaking off with my computer.

Characters vanish for no apparent reason, just so they can make a dramatic re-entrance a few minutes later. Giant, sentient robots capable of intergalactic travel behave like dim-witted six-year-olds just so the neurotic teenage protagonist can have a panic attack worrying that his parents will catch him... um... being out of bed, or something. Wait, what the hell was he worried about? A character steals top-secret national security material and sneaks across town to have her hacker buddy interpret it; he does, and unearths seemingly-vital information; a SWAT team kicks down the door and drags them both off to certain imprisonment; the character passionately implores her interrogators to let her reveal this vital information to the Secretary of Defense; this vital information comes to absolutely no importance at all: everyone already knew it. A computer virus disables, apparently, all the communications technology in the world - for example, a character picks up a secure phone to call his family and hears a dead line; not five minutes later, this apparent utter lack of long-distance communications technology does absolutely nothing to prevent this same character from ordering the military to high alert, nearly setting off World War III. Ominous mention is made, repeatedly, of military actions by Russia and China against the United States; absolutely nothing comes of this. The protagonist's best robo-friend is tortured, apparently horribly, such that the other Autobots consider his life sacrificed; a few minutes later, he's totally fine.

I hate to pick over little details in movies. Really I do. I knew a guy once who would watch movies on VHS and pause them occasionally so that he could point out, in a superior tone of voice, that a particular character's pants had changed colors without explanation, or that he could see a boom mike on-camera, or that the part of someone's hair had changed. He considered the pointing-out of these small continuity errors to be valid criticisms of the film itself. I think that's bullshit, frankly. It drove me nuts. Similarly, it drives me nuts when people watch films and criticize what happens in them. I take the plots of films as inarguable reality, within the particular movie's universe: Roger Ebert wrote once (I'm paraphrasing here) that he didn't care so much what a film was about, but rather about how it was about what it was about. I think that's the best way to watch a film, read a book, play a video game. What happens in it is inarguable, as long as what happens seems to proceed from the framework of the story, from the personalities of the characters, from the tension that forms the plot. Does it? Why does this particular film/book/video game depict these characters during these events? What does it seem to have to say about them? Does the film/book/video game say what it has to say articulately, creatively, coherently? Does it tell its story effectively? Does it tell a story at all? Does it have integrity, in a fairly literal sense? Is it artful? If I'm thinking about these things while watching a film, reading a book, playing a video game (sports games don't count), then I'm not going to work up a sweat over the piddly little details like whether a character has a cleaner shave in one shot than in the one before it. Who gives a crap.

I'm not picking over details with Transformers, either. For a brief window it works as a surprisingly entertaining fluff comedy about a neurotic teenage dork with a living car. Sure, it gets awfully uncomfortable when the camera lingers on the sweaty torso of a high-school-aged female character, and sure, all the parallel stories about the budding Transformers war and worldwide security crisis are boring and nonsensical, but for the twenty minutes or so during which the movie is about Shia LeBoeuf and the awkwardness of having a sentient car, there were some genuine non-embarrassed laughs in there. Mostly they were due to the filmmakers seemingly giving LeBoeuf no script at all and saying, "Alright kid, we loved you in Constantine, now do some more of that. Go!"

The problem (well, the biggest problem) was that the moviemakers kept trying to shoehorn an action movie into this humble, goofy, C+ comedy. And that action movie sucked. And then it seemed like, two-thirds of the way through, even the editor realized it sucked, so he took a friggin' Cuisinart to the film reel. Somewhere along the way, right around the time John Turturro showed up, the film slipped completely off the rails and never came close to getting back. Bogged down by the mystery character with the mustache who showed up entirely out of nowhere 70% of the way into the movie and suddenly started explaining everything to us like we're stupid? Well, here's an inexplicable and completely unprompted Reservoir Dogs standoff between two groups of military guys to take your mind off it! Finding the inside of the Hoover Dam insufficiently cinematic for the climactic showdown the plot requires? Well, here's one of those handy military guys to calmly lay out a spontaneously-formed and utterly-idiotic plan for arbitrarily moving the action to a city location!

Here's the thing: generally speaking, stories are well-served by characters with actual attributes that motivate their actions. If a character says, "Hey, lets take this immeasurably-important artifact with the power to destroy the entire planet, put it in a bright yellow car, and drive it out of this hyper-secured military facility where it has been safe and secure for eighty years and into the downtown shopping district of a local city," I can live with that, as long as it has been established much earlier that this particular character is meant to be understood as a moron; or that the bad guys have a special kind of eye-condition that makes crowded shopping districts, bright yellow sports cars, and convoys of military vehicles invisible to them; or that this sort of move works on Planet X, the setting of the film, because on Planet X ladies with shopping bags explode into huge fireballs whenever bad guys try to walk past them on their way to seizing powerful artifacts. Or alternatively, if the other characters are meant to be understood to be even dumber than the character who made this suggestion. Character attributes, driving action. Kind of like real life, only with giant sentient robots.

The alternative to this approach is to have the needs of the plot drive the characters, which requires the characters to change their attributes on a continuous basis, so that, for example, the unscrupulous little sleaze who was hawking his family heirlooms in class and on eBay will suddenly become the kind of guy who thinks it's sickening and offensive that the girl he's barely known for all of 24 hours didn't make time to tell him all about her past participation in her father's career as a car thief. Well, that's one alternative. The other alternative is not to give the characters any features at all, so that the audience is never confused by their inconsistent behavior. Like, for example, you could cast your movie with seven or eight giant metallic robots who all look pretty much exactly the same when they're not in vehicle form, give them indistinguishable voices and speech patterns, and then have them behave just as ridiculously as you like: this way, when the action scenes heat up and the fenders start flying, no one in the audience will go, "No way Bonecrusher would have said that macho catch phrase with a straight face! He's the ironic, introspective one!"

Unfortunately for viewing audiences everywhere, the makers of Transformers opted for both of these approaches. Giant sentient war-machines with machine guns for hands hurl themselves with abandon at each other, yet run from policemen who are smaller than their feet. Heroic leaders preach the sanctity of human life, then bash down office buildings doing wrestling moves on the bad guy. The plot requires them to do these things, not the structures of their own personalities. Are we meant to believe Optimus Prime has a strange phobia of Italian-American character actors shamelessly mugging for a huge paycheck to fund their next failed directorial project? Does he have irritable bowel syndrome? He only needs to make all seven of his dramatic, slow-motion entrances because he keeps inexplicably disappearing during moments of high tension.

I'm not going to go on any further about the inconsistencies of Transformers. You get the point. The net effect of all the sloppiness is that the film's big-ticket actions scenes are laughably inert and boring. Because, who gives a crap? Clearly these guys are just giant, metallic plot constructs: why should I care if they bash each other to iron filings? Half the time I can't even tell who's doing the bashing: they all look the same, they all sound the same, and they all speed up or slow down or stop altogether whenever the script needs for the characters to spew inspirational crap at each other at key moments down the stretch. I found that I fleetingly enjoyed the section of this movie that was about one particular character dealing with a ridiculous situation; the glossy, fast-paced action scenes were long, agonizingly boring, embarrassingly repetitive, and incomprehensible.

So how does Transformers grade out? Full disclosure: I loved the original animated Transformers movie directed by Nelson Shin, even though I consider it a monumentally crappy film. I owned it on VHS in my early 20s and watched it until it didn't work anymore. The realization last night that Transformers: The Movie, the actual animated feature with Eric Idle, Scatman Crothers, and Orson Welles pissing their reputations down the drain, was a tighter, more efficiently, and more expertly constructed movie than this big-budget, live-action blockbuster shocked me. Was Transformers as insulting, as overblown, as pompous, or as sickening as Michael Bay's other memorable atrocity, Armageddon? No, not nearly. On the other hand, it wasn't nearly as much fun to make fun of, once I realized that it was crap.

So is Transformers a zero-star film? Not really. Back to Ebert: another thing he once wrote (and again, I'm wildly paraphrasing here) was that when meting out review-stars to bad films, he generally reserves the dreaded zero-star grade for films that aren't merely incompetent, but also reprehensible in one way or another. In that sense, a half-star grade could be considered a worse review than a full-on zero-star grade, simply because it takes a kind of lunatic ambition to make a true zero-star film, a film that's not only crappy, but also poisonous and reprehensible. A half-star movie can be merely really, really, really crappy.

Transformers isn't really a half-star film either. I feel like that's giving it too much recognition. What it really is, is a one-star film. It aspires to be giddy, entertaining bullshit, and if it had succeeded, it could have been a three-star film, since three stars is the ceiling for movies whose ambitions include the word "bullshit." Instead, it ends up as lumbering, sloppy bullshit. But I guess, in another sense, it did its job: while I was staring in slack-jawed, dumbstruck awe at the diarrhea exploding across my television screen, Michael Bay made off with like eight cents of my money, the prorated portion of my monthly Netflix fee that probably finds its way to his pocket. "Oh my God. OH MY GOD! Something just happened!" That fucker!

The Easter Triduum, Yo. Part One.

2008-03-24T06:29:00.000-07:00

'Kay, so, it's been all of 36 hours or so since The Event itself, which really isn't nearly enough time to collect all my various thoughts and recollections (or, really, to even have all my various thoughts and recollections) into a coherent perspective. Still, some formal accounting must be done, if only so that I get some of this stuff on the record before I forget it.

My Easter Triduum kicked off, really, with a general walk-through and rehearsal on Tuesday evening. These sorts of things - walk-throughs, rehearsals, et cetera - are immensely helpful to me as a way of dispelling whatever anxiety I had about my own ability to follow simple directions under pressure. In this case, that meant actually taking unconsecrated bread and wine, as a way of proving to myself that yes, I could indeed cup my hands in front of my chest without accidentally flailing my arm outward and knocking a bowl full of the Body of Christ across the floor; yes, I could deliver a silver-dollar-sized, nearly weightless sliver of cracker to my tongue without poking either of my eyes out and/or flinging the wafer over my shoulder and into the eye of the person behind me; yes, I could indeed hold a cup in my hands, tilt it toward the correct facial orifice, take a sip of liquid, and return the cup to the hands of another person without knocking the cup high into the air, or pouring the wine into my nose and/or on the floor and/or all over the top of my head, or returning the cup to the Eucharistic Minister without punching my hands through his or her chest or accidentally sticking it in my pocket or bursting into flames or getting eaten by a tiger. Have you ever stood on or near a ledge and had that sudden panicked fear that quite contrary to your will, your body might just toss itself over the side? These are the things I worry about.

Still, I must say that it made me sad to take the bread and wine on Tuesday, even though they were unconsecrated - and therefore un-transubstantiated, and therefore not the Eucharist, and therefore not the body and blood of Christ but rather a dry, flavorless cracker and a sip of weak port. There was a part of me - the majority part, in fact - that felt like I should be nervous when taking the Eucharist for the first time, that I shouldn't have any idea what the bread might - we're talking on the level of mere sensation, here - taste like, that I should have to turn over my anxiety and approach the Eucharistic Minister with faith that my body wouldn't heave me over the side. Christ was both fully man and fully God; similarly, the Eucharist is both fully the body and blood of Christ and fully a cracker and some juice. This means that it has a taste, a texture, a mouth feel, a residue that gets stuck in your teeth and you have to tongue it out of there while you're trying to pray afterward. I spent a year in RCIA, preparing for the Easter sacraments, and I'm overwhelmingly glad I had that opportunity to learn and prepare, but on some level, I still wanted to be unprepared. Or at least not that prepared. The preliminary, unconsecrated, non-Eucharist trial run bread and wine dispelled much of my anxiety about whether or not I could receive bread and wine without somehow reducing the entire altar to smoldering rubble, but also dispelled much of that magical expectant feeling that had been building throughout Lent. Throughout much of the past year, in fact.

Eh. You take the good with the bad. Long story short (too late!), they prepared me for my first Eucharist. The issue of whether they could adequately prepare me for having my feet washed and kissed by an elderly priest in front of hundreds of strangers (or whether preparing for such a thing is even possible, or advisable), on the other hand....

Welcome To My Shit!

2008-03-19T07:39:00.000-07:00

Hi there. I'm the host of the blog Everything I Say Ain't Not No Lie, which is a handy-dandy place for various internet shucking and jiving, even if I don't use it all that frequently. That blog was originally intended as a place for various creative writing endeavors and personal journaling - it has since been almost entirely consumed by sloppy, half-assed sports commentary. I like it anyway. It gets the job done. That job, at least.

So why did I create this blog, then?

Well, here's the thing: I don't really write the Liar's Paradizzle (that's Everything I Say Ain't Not No Lie, by the way) blog as myself. I didn't really begin it with any particular set of parameters in mind, other than thinking it was neat-o to have a blog. The posting was sporadic, unfocused, and never unified by any real standard. Eventually, suffering major writer's block, I started posting weekly NFL picks as a way of keeping myself writing something, anything, and that snarky sports fan voice quickly came to dominate the blog, rendering it a place unsuited to the kind of introspective and/or thoughtful writing I'd like to be doing. I posted an analysis/commentary on the presidential election primaries a while back, and it felt woefully out of place. So I've decided to give that blog to my inner sports fan, formally and indefinitely.

So what's this blog going to be about?

Keep reading. Let's find out. I won't hang you out in the dark completely: I'm soon-to-be-officially Catholic (I'll be taking the Easter sacraments of initiation on Saturday), I'm an embarrassingly sincere progressive, I'm getting married in a few weeks, I don't think any combination of those three things is in any valid way contradictory or paradoxical, and I love dogs. If there's any particular social or political issue that gets me riled up, I've come to find that it is irresponsibility and dereliction in the media. So, if you should find that the posting done here tends to revolve around some combination or assortment of those topic, don't be surprised, nor claim I didn't give fair warning.

Here's a list of the topics I'm hoping to cover in the near future (it'll be tough, what with a major expansion of duties at work, a wedding, a honeymoon, Holy Week and the Easter Triduum, a move across town, and hopefully expanding involvement in my church community all on my plate... and that's only looking at the next six weeks):

(...this list is more for my own benefit, so I don't forget what I've been meaning to write about...)

- the turmoil in the Democratic Party and the search for a party identity in the post-Bush world;
- the role of Judas in our understanding of our identity as Christians;
- the horror, the horror of the mainstream media (this will be an ongoing topic);
- my ongoing puzzlement at certain facets of the larger Christian community;
- the flailing economy, and the media's coverage thereof;
- whatever the hell else I feel like writing about at any given moment of free time.

I heartily invite anyone and everyone to comment and/or reply at will to anything I post here. It's my hope that I'll have the patience and integrity to use this blog as a starting point for conversations, rather than as a soapbox for my own personal ranting. Please help.

Thanks.