Miscellaneous Musings
Miscellaneous Musings: On America, and How We Are Losing the War on Terror
I was in 5th grade when 19 men hijacked four airplanes and crashed three into the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon. A fourth plane was crashed in a field in Pennsylvania instead of in Washington, D.C., when the men and women aboard flight United 93 decided that they weren’t going down without a fight. I remember walking into school that day after having briefly heard something on the news about planes crashing into buildings. I remember walking past my third grade teacher at the door, who remains to this day the only person I personally know whom I actively wish death upon (I’m not kidding or exaggerating about this), and asking her, “Did you hear? Some people crashed a plane into some buildings in New York.” I remember I was wearing a white T-shirt and jean shorts and a blue plaid short-sleeved shirt over my T-shirt. I remember it was sunny.
I remember moments of silence, and hearing the Star Spangled Banner play in foreign countries, and flags at half mast. We’d never been attacked like that. Oh sure, we had the Oklahoma City bombing and the first attempt to blow up the World Trade Center, and the odd lone lunatic. But we never imagined something on this scale. Things like that happened in other countries, not here. We never imagined that anyone would be gutsy or stupid enough to punch us in the face like that and piss off the world’s most powerful superpower.
In 2001 we shaped our national narrative – that we were the noble warriors who had been sucker-punched by the evil terrorists, and by God we were going to even that score! We would hunt al-Qaeda in their caves in Afghanistan and make them pay for our orphaned children and the blood they shed on our soil. In 2003 we told ourselves that Saddam Hussein, that evil lunatic who had massacred the Kurds and bloodied Kuwait and was sitting on all the weapons of mass destruction and who murdered his own people, needed to go; after all, he was helping terrorism. In the intervening years, we decided we needed to strike in Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia, because, after all, there were terrorists there as well. We decided to supply our police in tiny towns and colossal cities with mine resistant vehicles and surplus body armor and sniper rifles and tear gas, because, after all, we don’t know where the terrorists will strike. We decided that the collateral damage was acceptable when a drone strike in a city or compound or convoy killed some civilians; after all, if they were good people, they wouldn’t be living near terrorists. In 2010, we decided that it was okay to murder US citizens without a trial; after all, if they’re an a terrorist then they’re an enemy of the state. We decided to torture people for information, but that was okay; after all, they were terrorists and they do the same to us and we were saving lives with that information. We decided that it was okay to spy on Middle Easterners and people who looked like Middle Easterners and put them on watch lists, because, after all, even if they weren’t terrorists they might know someone who was. We decided that it was okay to suck up the data of American citizens and tap their communications without warrant or due process because, after all, they have nothing to fear if they’re not doing anything wrong, and the threat of terrorism is worth a few crushed civil liberties.
When did we get so far down this slippery slope, anyway?
***********************************************************************************************************************************************************
America isn’t doing so hot in the Middle East right now in the “killing the bad guys before they kill other people” department, what with Hamas killing Israelis, Israelis killing Hamas and anyone who happens to be standing close to Hamas, Sunnis killing Shi’ites, Shi’ites killing Sunnis, ISIS killing everyone who disagrees with them and also some people who agree with them but happen to be standing next to people who disagree with them, dogs and cats living together, and generalized mass hysteria. I’m not going to talk about that. Instead, I’m going to make what is probably a fairly controversial statement:
In terms of America “winning” the War on Terror, the outcome of the situation in the Middle East doesn’t matter.
Let me explain that statement. I am NOT saying that the situation in the Middle East isn’t important. I’m not saying it isn’t godawful and horrible and an affront to whatever deity you choose to believe in. I’m not saying that the innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria and every other country in the Middle East don’t matter, because they absolutely, certainly do. I am not saying that that situation is or isn’t ultimately completely the fault of imperialism and a bunch of other factors. I am saying that ultimately, victory in the War on Terror will not be achieved by killing all the terrorists or killing all the people that look like terrorists or killing all the people who might one day become terrorists, or by preventing terrorists from killing anyone. I am saying that the victory conditions for the War on Terror do not pass anywhere near the Middle East.
Oxford defines terrorism as “the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims”. Merriam-Webster defines it as “the use of violent acts to frighten the people in an area as a way of trying to achieve a political goal.” The important thing to note here is that creating violence and fear is NOT the goal of terrorism. That is simply a means to an end. (That isn’t to say that there aren’t people in terrorist organizations who care about anything beyond that. The guys organizing the show, however, very much have an endgame in mind.) The goal of terrorism is to cause political change. So if we define winning a war as “preventing the opposing side from carrying out their intended goal” (ie, preventing the US colonies from breaking away from Britain, preventing Britain from stopping the colonies from breaking away from Britain, etc.), the US is absolutely, 100%, losing the War on Terror.
Terrorists don’t win when they kill people. They don’t win when they walk into a mall and open fire on shoppers. They don’t win when they bomb subways or ships. They don’t win when they strap on a bomb and blow up a marketplace. They don’t win when they cut off a journalist’s head and then splash the video on YouTube. They don’t win when they murder schoolchildren for the crime of getting an education. They don’t win when they fly airplanes into buildings, even if that kills 3,000 people.
Every time the NSA spies on American citizens, terrorists win. Every time we write off innocents killed in a drone strike as “acceptable losses”, terrorists win. Every time a SWAT unit using military surplus equipment kills or maims an innocent American, terrorists win. EVERY. SINGLE. FREAKING. TIME. a politician says “because if we don’t the terrorists will win” or “think of the families of the 9/11 victims” or “DEAR GOD THE TERRORISTS WILL EAT OUR CHILDREN” in justifying taking away your fundamental, specifically established, unalienable rights and acting contrary to basic human decency, THE TERRORISTS. F*CKING. WIN.
When we abandon the bedrock upon which this nation was founded – when we decide that truth and justice are no longer the American way and that freedom is a more palatable currency than blood, the terrorists win.
When we decide that it’s okay to use the tactics that make the bad guys the bad guys, the terrorists win.
If we truly as a nation think that it’s better to sacrifice our freedom for security, than it is time for us to be open and honest about. Let’s sit up and look it straight in the face and admit that we do not value our right to live free from governmental intimidation and the erosion of our Constitution and Bill of Rights more than we value our lives. Let’s stop calling ourselves the land of the free and the home of brave. If we give into intimidation and terror we aren’t brave and we certainly aren’t free.
I’ve read articles and opinions written by people who believe that it’s impossible for us to go back to the way we were – that we can only hope to slow down our now inevitable fall. Maybe that’s true. Maybe there’s too much apathy and hopelessness and lack of faith in our country right now. As one of my favorite authors (Terry Pratchett) wrote, however, “It’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness.”
We may not be able to recover from what we’ve done and allowed to be done in our names. But we should not ever stop trying. Because when we admit that defeat, the terrorists win.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Miscellaneous Musings: How to Cross the Street Without Giving Me the Urge to Run You Over
Hello, gentle readers. You may have noticed that I was on a long hiatus. Fortunately, it was a productive hiatus. Since I last updated you on the Mann-Spider War, I have:
Killed 14 spiders – mostly with chemical weapons, but occasionally with blunt force trauma.
Beat “We Don’t Go to Ravenholm” in Half Life 2 (I did a lot more in Half Life 2; this was just what was taking me awhile because I couldn’t find a switch for about three months)
Got 85% through Tomb Raider 2013.
Graduated from college with a degree in biochemistry and minors in chemistry and computer science.
Got accepted to a Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Ph.D. program.
Found a swanky apartment to live in while attending said Ph.D. program. An apartment with many, many, many perks.
Killed a spider in said apartment.
As you can see, I’ve been busy.
But tonight I had an incident that gave me pause. And in that pause I thought “Hey, it’s time the world learned how to do this properly.” So, without further adieu, I present my guide on How to Cross the Street Without Giving Me the Urge to Run You Over.
I. Pedestrian Crossings
If you are a pedestrian, you don’t want to get hit by a car. They’re heavier than you, you see, and generally speaking they move pretty fast. Heavy + fast = large momentum = SPLAT. And then you have to mess with hospitals and insurance, or alternatively, your loved ones/people-who-would-show-up-to-your-funeral-to-make-sure-you’re-dead have to deal with mortuaries and life insurance. The moral of this story is that it’s a mess. Don’t get hit by a car.
Here are some good rules of thumb to avoid this eventuality:
1) Do not saunter across the road. Walk briskly. You don’t have to sprint (and probably shouldn’t because if you trip and fall the motorists will be irritated), but neither should you proceed to look directly at me and slow down in the cross walk with your hands in your pockets and your pant line at mid-waist. Someday, when I rule the world, you will do this, and I will accelerate.
2) Use crosswalks. Don’t be that jerk who jaywalks. “But Fearless Leader,” you might ask. “What about those times when traffic is light and the crosswalk is 50 feet away from me?” SUCK IT UP. Avoid giving the paraplegics of the world the middle finger and use your completely functional legs to walk to the flipping crosswalk. I don’t care if there’s no traffic. There could be traffic in fifteen seconds, in which case they have to be paying attention during the time period that you’re sauntering across the road.
3) Look both ways before you cross the street. Any street. Bike path. Whatever. Just take two fricking seconds to ascertain whether or not a gigantic metal death machine will be attempting to occupy the same space as you if you step off the curb. SUCK IT UP. Avoid giving the quadriplegics of the world the middle finger and use your completely functional neck to turn your head left and right. I don’t care if you think there’s no traffic. There could be traffic in fifteen seconds, in which case they have to be paying attention during the time period that you’re sauntering across the road outside of a crosswalk.
II. Bicycle Crossings
1) Don’t ride a bike. And if you do go ahead and ride a bike, understand that by doing so you agree to allow every motorist to hate your living guts. And possibly your dead ones, too, if you do stupid stuff. This is because bicyclists routinely do stupid things, like take up an entire lane on a single lane road, wear dark clothing and no reflectors at night, and ride their bicycles out in the middle of traffic without any warning. So every single time a motorist sees you on a bike, they assume that you’re going to do something stupid, and the get anxious waiting for you to do that stupid thing. This leads to hypertension, and nobody likes hypertension.
2) For the love of Godtopus, get off of your bike and walk it across the street. This makes motorists happier, because now you move as slowly as a pedestrian. And while pedestrians do stupid things too, it takes them longer to do those stupid things than it would if they were on a bicycle, so motorists are happier. Not happy, but happier.
4) I realize that cars are supposed to yield to pedestrians and bicycles in crosswalks. That’s fine. But as a cyclist, you need to understand that if I’ve just watched the two cars in front of me turn left, while I have the green arrow, then I’m going to naturally assume that there isn’t anything to impede my left turn.
The red beam is my field of vision. You will note that amongst my many superpowers, which include traveling forward in time by sitting in my bed eating crackers while playing Half Life, I do not, in fact, possess x-ray vision. Please be aware that there is a slight chance that this drawing is not to scale.
So if you, oh, I don’t know, start crossing the street while the gray car in front of me finishes turning, whist I’m following said car into the turn, without checking to see if there’s a car in back of the gray car, without the walk sign, then I don’t think that you a) get to yell at me to slow down when I’m not even doing the speed limit, especially since I didn’t even get more than a few feet into the turn before I stopped in an effort to not aid Darwinism, b) call me a punk, especially since I was dressed nicely, and c) act like that whole thing was my fault. Yeah, I get that you were freaked out because you dove into the crosswalk without looking both ways and then saw several thousand pounds of metal death machine creeping towards you and the child that you were pulling behind you. But guess what? It’s not my fault. If I had hit you, it would not have been my fault. I’m sure I would have been blamed, because dead small children with dead parents tend to instill a need to blame whoever is still standing, but it would not have been my fault. So thank your lucky stars that I was paying attention, because you sure as heck weren’t, and while I would feel bad about your dead kid, I really wouldn’t feel all that bad about you. Because yes, when you called me names and yell at me for your own jackassery, I tend to have the urge to run you over. So don’t do that.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Miscellaneous Musings: On April Fools’ Day
Hello internet. We need to chat. Specifically, we need to chat about April Fools’ Day.
Look, I know you think you’re clever about posting some fake bit of outrageous news that everyone is totally going to be freaked out about for about as long as it takes for them to scroll to the bottom of the post and read “HAHAHA APRIL FOOL’S DAY!” (The improper punctuation was intentional.)
It is never acceptable to be a moronic troll. Not even on April Fools’ Day. Especially not on April Fools’ Day.
Let’s be clear. You are not being clever. You are not being cute. You are not being unique. You are being a dumb***.
I’m sure some of you are thinking by now that I’m one of those people who routinely gets burned today and therefore I’m just being a spoil sport.
You know what? You’re absolutely right. I have been burned dozens of times. Off the top of my head, just last year, someone close to me who shall remain nameless fake broke up with someone who will also definitely remain nameless on April Fools’ Day. And, since I am a reasonable person who thinks that you don’t ever joke about breaking up with someone with whom you have been in a relationship, I assumed I had license to act as I normally would in a situation in which said person close to me was being cheated upon, which involved closing off some social media outlets and finding out where I could buy garbage bags and rent a chainsaw for a reasonable price. (Home Depot, in case you were wondering.)
What if I hadn’t found out that this was fake until after I’d already driven across state lines and rendered someone physically incapable of reproducing? Boy, would my face have been red. Also my hands, and the chainsaw (before I cleaned it.)
Today, I was perusing NASA’s Astronomy Picture Of The Day site when I came across this absolutely darling gem. Did it ruin my day? No, but it was irritating. (Also I was enjoying the fake story and thought it was far sweeter and cuter than the actual story.) As a website run by a government agency, I expect my NASA blog to be above this sort of thing.
You know who else I expect to be above this sort of thing? News agencies. I feel that if your job – your very purpose for existing – is to tell people about important events, then you are not suddenly allowed to act like an idiot one day a year. Especially not in the internet age, when you can post made-up crap that will be cited as fact for about three hours and then forgotten about in the next six and then accepted as fact again for the next several years until Snopes posts a clarification.
In this day and age, people need to be responsible about what they post. If it’s a big enough piece of news, people – like me – tend to assume that it’s one of those things people won’t joke about and accept it as fact. And in the internet age, that piece of news can reach every corner of the globe in hours. Unfortunately, the truth of the matter will be fighting an up-hill battle as people try to make sense of all the misinformation. Can you imagine what would happen if an actual emergency happened today? What if we were attacked today? Some people wouldn’t believe it because April Fools. I don’t want to sound alarmist or like a kill joy, but news agencies today could literally accidentally crash our economy within the span of a few hours by making up crap like banks failing or a company doing something egregiously stupid.
I HATE not being able to take anything that happens today seriously. I really do.
JUST KIDDING! APRIL FOOLS’ DAY!
.
.
.
.
.
See? Do you see how much this makes you look like a douchebag?
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Snarky Cinema: “The Omega Man” or “How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Never Let Certain People Pick The Movie Ever Again, Ever”
When I wrote most of this, I was sitting comfortably in a lecture hall auditorium with a stomach full of liquid nitrogen ice cream. This is good, because if I were watching this movie on an empty stomach I would be mildly irritated instead of mildly amused. I take it back. This movie is squarely in “so bad it’s hysterical” territory.
As near as I can tell, The Omega Man (1971, directed by Boris Sagal) is the old man’s version of I Am Legend. (They are actually based off of the same book, so this isn’t me being snarky so much as factual.) The heroes of both movies are named Robert Neville. (One of them is played by Will Smith. I would much rather watch Will Smith run around shirtless for two hours than 48 year old Charlton Heston.) I’m sure it has some deep insightful message into the human condition and all that stuff, but I can’t see past the albino zombie mutants (one of whom wandered from the set of this movie to The Princess Bride), glistening Charlton Heston, and narmy narms of narm.
Good old Chuck was 48 at the time this movie was made. While I understand that when he was younger he was quite the handsome fellow I just want to point out that what we will generously call a six pack covered with flab, fur, and whatever bodily fluid it is that Heston seems to secrete all the time is not nearly as attractive as the director of this movie seemed to think it was, given the number of Heston’s shirtless scenes.
The hands down best part of this movie is the music. And by “best” I mean I sincerely questioned the appropriateness of showing this movie to a roomful of people because the first track in the movie is rather heavy on the cheesy 70’s saxophone that has come to be associated with a certain genre of film that is generally not shown in polite company. This was the background music to car/motorcycle chases, the montage of end of the world stuff, Charlie attempting and succeeding in getting into the pants of a younger woman (oh wait, it made sense then), Charlie killing people, etc. I mean, I really don’t think that the music director actually knew what the movie was supposed to be about and only had the title “The Omega Man” to go off of when scoring the thing.
The acting is either hammy or bad, which is fine because the movie is a lot funnier that way. I am actually pretty sure that they didn’t intend for everyone to find it as funny as they do, but that’s neither here nor there.
Okay, so the plot basically goes that Russia and China got in a pissing contest and ended up missing the toilet bowl entirely and hit the rest of the world with biological weapons. Nearly everybody died except Charlton Heston, who was working on a cure and injected himself with the experimental vaccine, and other people, who are infected but resistant. The older infected turn into albino mutant light-and-technology-hating guys while the younger infected ostracize them (which is fair, because the albinos have a tendency to try and kill them) and live out in the middle of nowhere and, in the case of one guy, refuse to put on their shirts. Charlton Heston runs around killing the albinos (who, for some reason, lose pigment in their hair when they turn, which is not how hair pigment works.) One day, Charlie runs into the other survivors, takes up a whirlwind romance (with LOTS of sax music and lots of other stuff that also begins with an “s” and ends with an “x”) with a sassy black woman, cures her brother of the plague, and then dies. Oh yeah, there maybe should be a spoiler alert in there somewhere.
I’m gonna be honest, if you’re watching this movie for the plot then you are watching the wrong movie. Also, biochemistry does not work in any way, shape, or form it is shown in this movie. At one point a member of our audience (who actually wasn’t me, in case you were wondering) pointed out that Major Robert Neville, a military grade scientist with a PhD, failed to balance a centrifuge. In the movie, this didn’t matter. In real life, it would cause the centrifuge to wobble around on a tabletop until it fell off. This movie was so unrealistic.
There is a lot of social commentary that can be touched upon in the post-apocalyptic genre of film. I’m pretty sure they were trying to make some observations on the state of humanity because this movie included the future president of the NRA watching videos of Woodstock while talking to a statue and a bunch of political strawman mutants, which is the kind of thing I generally associate with poor political and social commentary in post-apocalyptic movies. The thing is, the mutants are far too comical to be scary or taken seriously (they spend the movie cackling and running around in black robes while pronouncing solemn judgments of doom and condemning technology and being ridiculously hypocritical), and at times Charlie is just so over the top absurd that the movie just comes off as farcical rather than thoughtful or thought-provoking.
Questions I Have:
-How do all of these buildings still have power? Society collapsed like two years ago, and the only generator is in Charlie’s house…
-Seriously, what is Charlton Heston excreting? I mean, does he have a special gland or something? Also, why does he bleed red paint? And since he is a scientist/doctor and can therefore be expected to know how to give himself an injection properly, why does he inject himself in an artery? Also, inserting a needle a millimeter beneath the skin of the arm does not result in high pressure blood spurts. That is scientifically inaccurate.
-At one point, the albino zombie mutant guys condemn Heston for using “the tools of the wheel.” Did these guys just forget that they built and were operating a freaking catapult not five hours earlier?
-Does anybody else find the albino black guy mildly racist?
-At one point a little girl asks Charlie “Are you God?” I wanted him to say “No, but I am Moses.” That’s not really a question, but it was funny because it was a stupidly pretentious thing to throw in the movie.
-Why is the movie rated PG? I’m pretty sure they had an “R” rating in 1971, and this movie kind of merits one, even by today’s standards.
4/10, with a +1 situational bonus because I was watching it with friends (I imagine this movie is considerably less funny when you watch it alone). This isn’t a good movie, it is only really barely a funny movie, and I would not watch it again unless it was with a crowd of people on sugar highs. So there’s your judgment.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Dear Firefox: I’m sorry. It’s not me. It’s you. I think it’s time I saw another browser.
Back when you were only Firefox 3, I loved you.
You were fast and sleek and assuaged my pointless paranoia and you were willing to change to make me happy.
But then you just had to go and ruin everything between us. You’re supposed to get better with newer versions. Just sayin’.
Sure, you still respect my privacy and I can still customize your interface.
But that doesn’t really matter when I can never be sure that your interface is going to be there for me or crashing in the next five seconds.
And you know what? When you’re actually there for me you drag your heels in the ground and act like it’s 1996. Seriously, we’re running off a DSL here – there is no reason it should take you ten seconds to load a blank page.
I can’t trust you anymore. And that hurts.
So I’m leaving you. FOR GOOGLE-FREAKING-CHROME.
Yeah, that’s how much you hurt me. I’m hanging out with Chrome now. A Google product. And you know how much I despise the Google family and how utterly terrifying they are.
But here’s the thing. Chrome isn’t willing to change very much for me, but darn it, Chrome is there when I need to browse. Every time. All the time.
Chrome doesn’t crash in the middle of loading a video.
Chrome recognizes that I’m a busy person with things to do and a low patience threshold and loads things accordingly.
Chrome spies on me, sure, but with you I generally couldn’t be online long enough for anything worth spying on to happen.
So I’m leaving you now. It kills me to do it, but I just can’t deal with you now.
Someday – when you’ve grown up some and gotten over this whole regression thing – maybe we can be together again.
But right now…I just can’t. I can’t deal with you and your problems. I have problems too, you know!
Chrome isn’t perfect and can be a colossal jerk – but Chrome’s problems are little problems. Little problems that I can deal with.
I’m sorry, love. I have to go now. Chrome is waiting for me.
Miscellaneous Musings: On Crosses
Happy Easter, everybody (who celebrates it)! Note how I refrained from saying “hoppy.” See guys? It is possible to well wish your fellow human beings on Easter Sunday without making that pun. I’m sorry. I’m in a bad mood today because somebody apparently wanted me awake so that she could search for Easter eggs or something like that. Now, I’m not a huge fan of being awake at 10:30 in the morning, but even I have to admit that it is not unreasonable to be awake at that time on Easter morning. No, where we get into problem territory is how the eight-year old woke me up. Let me say, for the record: If anyone – ever again – wakes me up by pulling on my ear, I will end you. My response to this situation was to make the pain stop, which resulted in me going from blissful sleep to very nearly clawing my sister’s face in the span of about an eighth of a second. (The very nearly part only happened because my fingernails didn’t make contact. My hand did.) I feel that I could have absolutely ensured that this technique would never be used on me again if I actually had gotten a piece of her, but then we would have spent the morning with recriminations and stuff and I would have been the bad guy, so I guess things worked out as well as they were going to.
But today is the day that Zombie Jesus rose after dying for your sins (Gandalf died for my sins,) so probably by sometime later in the day I will no longer want to throttle the precious flower.
Sacrifice. Right. Just a reminder that this isn’t intended to offend and that this essay assumes a religious view wherein the Easter story of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (or an approximation thereof) is acceptable at face value.
When I was growing up, all of the crosses in my church were plain wooden crosses. Every Sunday I would sit in the red upholstered uncomfortable pews and try to look like I was actually watching the sermon while surreptitiously reading. And when I finished my book I would spend what seemed like hours (but in retrospect was probably only about ten minutes) staring at the gigantic wooden cross behind the pulpit.
I learned much later in life that there is a big debate in Christianity over the appropriateness of using the cross as a religious symbol. The basic argument goes something along the lines of “Why would we use the instrument of our God’s death as a religious symbol?” And for the Catholics out there, “Why would we put our God’s impaled corpse on our religious symbol?” There is also a faction that argues that the cross is a graven image and therefore sacrilege anyway, so Christians shouldn’t be using crosses for that reason, let alone all the “murdered by Romans” reasons. This message board thread (spelling mistakes aside) succinctly sums it up: “…If my loved one was killed by a gun, would I be wearing a gun to symbolize my loved one’s death?”
I have a couple of problems with these lines of reasoning.
First, let us address graven images. You can look up whichever part of the Bible you want on the subject (there is a convenient list here), but the commands regarding the subject of graven images generally fall into one of three categories: 1) Don’t make any images of God, Heaven, or Hell. 2) Don’t make any images of God, Heaven, Hell, or any other God so you can worship images instead of God. 3) Don’t make any images of Creation. Period.
In response to 1, people imagine God. They may imagine God as an old white guy with a beard and white robes or as a shiny ball of light or as a woman who looks like Alanis Morisette, but they do have a mental image of God. And it is that image that they worship. Graven images help concretize the idea of God. Maybe someday people will be able to abstract like that, but at this point graven images are a necessary sacrilege. I think that the message Exodus was driving for was 2 – don’t worship graven images.
2 is pretty easy to avoid. So long as we recognize that our God is not a tiny cross hanging on our neck and worship that cross, we’re good.
3 is just plain stupid. Good luck communicating.
Moving on from graven images, I can now address stuff that isn’t nitpicking. The big, major problem I have with this line of reasoning is that it shows that the person making the argument is completely missing the whole entire point of the crucifixion. “If my loved one was killed by a gun…” is a completely inappropriate analogy. That idea assumes Christ as a passive victim to his crucifixion. This type of argument is made to show that humans are sinful creatures that killed their own God because of their wickedness. This is not what the Easter story means. The Easter story is about love. It is about a God who so loved his people that he willfully and deliberately sacrificed himself to save them. Jesus was not a victim. He was a martyr. A far more apt analogy would be “If your loved one self-immolated him or herself to make a political statement about religious repression or political freedom, would you use fire as a symbol of their sacrifice?”
Christ could have jumped down off the cross any damn time he wanted. But he didn’t. He walked to the garden knowing what would happen; he suffered the slings and arrows and whips of fortune and Roman soldiers even though he could have destroyed them without a thought.
Why do I use a cross to symbolize my faith? Because to me the cross is not a symbol of murder. It is a symbol of a single, simple great act of love. It is a symbol of sacrifice and faith that we can be better than we think. It is a covenant between Creator and Creation.
I can’t think of a better symbol than that.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Miscellaneous Musings: In Defense of Judas Iscariot
Today’s post is kind of on the religious side. For those of you who aren’t Christians, I would like to inform you that what I have faith in changes on a day to day basis and that today, on Good Friday (the day Jesus was crucified), I’m choosing to believe the story told in Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John. Or an approximation thereof, since the four of them can’t seem to agree on the details. I guess what I’m saying here is that this post is written under the assumption that God and Jesus are my personal saviors and that I am, underneath it all, at heart basically a good person. It is highly likely that by Tuesday I will believe that God is everything and of everything. Depending on how Tuesday goes I might believe something completely different by Wednesday. The only constant belief I have had for the past two years boils down to something along the lines of “I have faith. Sometimes things just happen. My Creator loves me, and asks only that I love my fellow man.” I tell you this not to apologize if my beliefs offend you, but to let you know what you’re about to read.
Yesterday I was perusing CNN’s website because I like making fun of the banality of the vast majority of the Twitter responses and Facebook posts things they report when I stumbled upon this article entitled “My Take: Is Judas in heaven or hell? God only knows.” The article, written by Craig Gross, is interesting – Gross talks about Judas and how despite traveling with Jesus for three years and witnessing all the miracles that the other eleven apostles witnessed he still betrayed Him for thirty pieces of silver. However, two things really annoyed me about this article.
First, at the end of the article Gross shuts down the discussion. His answer to the question is “maybe as we approach Easter, we can be reminded that for Christians, the cross and the grave should silence all of these debates…And I believe that where you end up, God only knows.” His answer is, essentially, “I don’t want to say one way or the other, so I will instead give you the vague impression that you should judge not lest ye be judged.” I feel that if you are going to take the time and space to write a think piece on whether or not Judas is enjoying quality time with the Morningstar, you should not then proceed to waffle on the issue.
What I really, really have a problem with though, is his statement that “without a doubt, Judas, the biblical disciple of Jesus, is considered the greatest sinner of all time because of what he did to Jesus.” Now, it is probably true that a lot of people believe that Judas is the greatest sinner of all time. Gross does say that Judas made a mistake and that the whole thing was preordained, but never does he disabuse his audience of the notion that this statement is basically true.
Let’s put things in perspective. Hitler and the Third Reich systematically tortured and murdered twelve million people in some of the most horrific ways possible. The war they instigated killed about 70 million more. Josef Stalin’s regime killed more people than the Holocaust, again with some horrific torture and violent murder thrown in for kicks. Here is a list of people who murdered those who had done them no harm. Here is a list of genocides. Today, as we speak, a single man has ordered the murder of thousands of his citizens to keep himself in power. Every single day humans murder, torture, rape, pillage, plunder, and blaspheme in the name of God and money and falsehood.
And we think that a man who, in concordance with the laws of the day, turned in a wanted criminal whose death was not only prophesied but necessary in God’s plan, is “the greatest sinner of all time.” Yeah. Question – Judas betrayed Jesus. A bunch of Roman soldiers tortured him. Who is worse – the betrayer of God or the torturer of God? And is Judas any better than Peter? They committed the same crime, but with different consequences. Peter denied Jesus three times; Judas handed Him over to the Romans once.
I’m not going to waffle here. Judas is in Heaven. Because the man that was crucified died for him just as much as he died for the murderers and soldiers and rapists and lovers and lepers and little children and kings and beggars and sinners and saints and me.
That is the God that Judas betrayed, and that is the God that teaches forgiveness.
Peace be with you.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )Miscellaneous Musings: On Lab Safety Discussions and ACS Videos
I am a science major. Therefore I have to take sciences classes which require me to work in what is known as a “lab” setting. Here, on a weekly basis, I behave like an adult while working with potentially dangerous chemicals and refrain from doing stupid things that could kill myself or others.
Unfortunately for me, this means that every single lab I take requires me to listen to what is essentially the same spiel about safety in the lab (the only differences from class to class is which safety rules the professor chooses to emphasize; what they choose to emphasize is a good indicator of how stupid previous lab sections have been.) Now that I’m a lab proctor (this means that when the professor isn’t in the room I have the task of making sure that nobody does anything for which the school could potentially be held liable) I get to listen to the safety spiel even more. (Except then I get paid to listen to it. I’m not going to ruin the message here by mentioning how TOTALLY AWESOME that is.)
“But Carla” -you might ask- “don’t these safety spiels convey important information that is necessary to keep everyone safe?” Yes. Yes they do. AND THIS IS NOT A GOOD THING. Yes, I do believe that some people should die. Anyone who has ever chatted with me when the subject of Ahmadinejad, Roman Polanski, or people-who-don’t-signal-when-they-change-lanes came up knows this about me.
I’m just going to say right here and now: If you are in a college level science course, this means that at some point you have passed high school or gotten a GED. This means that you have, at some point, demonstrated that you have the ability to read, write, and follow basic instructions. It would also imply (since this is a requirement of graduating high school in most states) that you have had, at some point, a science course, where you would, at some point, have already been told all about lab safety. THEREFORE – at this point in your life, if you think that it is an acceptable practice for you to eat or drink things that you have made out of chemicals that came from bottles with skulls and crossbones on them, nature is telling you and everyone around you that you need to die. Your genes are not fit to be passed on. If you are that monumentally lacking in common sense and basic reasoning skills at this point in your life then there is no way that any of your other genes can make up for the abominations that you have released or will release upon this world.
Yeah...just...yeah. I'm a fan of early season, diabolical-take-over-the-world Stewie, but really, he's just gay now which is kind of an old joke. Chris is the posterboy for this principle, and let's face it - Meg is a butt-monkey.
Another thing – does the American Chemical Society just not make safety videos anymore? And by anymore I mean for the past thirty years or so, because I have yet to see a safety video that did not proudly display ’80s fashions or ’80s scripts.
I only bring this up because the safety video I saw today for my organic* chem lab featured such amazingly well-acted and deep, thought provoking characters as “BURNadette” and the Academy-Award nominee, “REXPLOSION!” See what I did there? I capitalized the punny parts of their names. And put an exclamation point on the end of “Rexplosion” because he’s the kind of guy that would stick that on there. Oh God I want to shoot myself.
In fact, that video starts off with an anonymous college freshman who eventually gets a name (which I forgot, because honestly, who cares?) walking calmly and sedately into a college science building. I would like to state for the record that he gives absolutely no indication that he is suffering from severe mental illness, which is weird because he has a psychotic LSDish hallucination thirty seconds later. Also, I would swear that he was wearing pink lipstick.
In this hallucination, our dear freshie who I’m just gonna go ahead and call “Freddy” (fun fact: Freddy is the name of one of my roommates’ fish; it is also the name of the protagonist of the movie I am going to watch sometime this week, who bravely defends moviegoers against terminally stupid or promiscuous teens – I am, of course, referring to my good friend and colleague Freddy Krueger, although I firmly believe that Jackie Earl Haley just can’t compare to Robert Englund) witnesses the Emmy-award winning duo “Burnadette” and “Rexplosion” discussing something or other (I wasn’t really paying attention to what they were saying so much as I was listening to a fake accent that would make Bela Lugosi snap and go on a killing spree and watching the unbelievable overacting that would make Shatner weep with envy) while waiting for some dude who had the word “mess” in his name, so I guess he would be the anthropomorphic personification of cleanliness and good tidings. The best part of this whole scene is the billowing fog effects and the red lighting that makes it look like a scene out of Little Nicky. Or the parts of Little Nicky where Hitler gets the pineapples shoved up his…face. Hi Mom! Hi Dad!
Freddy snaps out of his reverie when he is approached by a female chemistry professor who is altogether far better looking than any female character from an ’80s production has any right to be, and then they go off to her office wherein she awkwardly tells him a bunch of stuff that he will be told again when they have the safety presentation for his lab. AND BOTH CHARACTERS KNOW THIS! Or should know it. Common sense would dictate that. Of course, common sense was not something heavily on display in this movie…
Anyway, that part of the movie is pretty normal and straightforward and doesn’t advocate the use of hallucinogens, but it’s too little too late. I’m sorry, ACS screenwriters – I can’t take anything you say seriously after that. You thought you could connect to kids via this…thing? Clearly you people are seriously lacking in judgment and good taste, and I shouldn’t take anything you say at face value. Will behaving in the lab responsibly really keep me safe? Will my goggles actually protect my eyes better from chemical splashes than my Batman-like reflexes and eyelids?
I don’t know anymore.
I just don’t know.
*I realize this footnote kind of ruins the impact of that elegant ending statement, but I wanted to mention that there is another (better) safety video – that does not drive its intended viewing demographic insane via hum’rous skits involving desperate-out-of-work actors – for the gen chem labs. The highlight of this video is when the narrator goes something along the lines of
“If you spill corrosive chemicals on yourself, get in the safety shower immediately.” All this over a video where a guy gets spilled on
and then starts taking off his shirt in the safety shower while (and this is important) the guy who spilled on him looks on. Then, “Take off ALL your clothes – don’t let modesty be the cause of serious injury. Your lab director will make sure the other students leave so you have privacy” – this over footage of a pile of growing clothes. The last thing to hit the pile? The dude’s underwear. Then the video immediately cuts to the same guy in the shower (sans clothes) WHILE THE GUY WHO SPILLED ON HIM IS STILL RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIM. The narrator is a liar. And this video has homoerotic undertones.
Miscellaneous Musings: On The Lack of Originality in Mainstream Movies
So a few posts back you might remember me mentioning I was going to do something a bit different and then I seemed to just put out more of the same. I have a couple of excuses for that: 1) That was right around finals time and I was busy getting A’s in all of my classes (you can applaud, it’s okay), 2) right after that I got sick (see this post), 3) right after that I remained sick for quite some time and I’ve been at a funeral and I wandered onto TV tropes a week ago and still haven’t found my way out and then zombie Nazis invaded and I’ve had a bunch of other things to be doing. It’s great stuff.
However, now that I’m feeling marginally better (“marginally” as in “Taylor Lautner is a marginally better actress than Robert Pattinson”; or, at least, his abs look better), I am going to go ahead and put the “Miscellaneous Musings” into “Things I Like and Other Miscellaneous Musings” by talking about a subject near and dear to my heart: movies. More specifically, I’m going to talk about how by and large the cinematic fare being presented this summer sucks like a three year old trying to eat a Wendy’s frosty with a straw.
(To be clear, I’m not ragging on independent or limited release pictures (although I have heard that we have a pitiful repast in this arena this summer as well) because a) I usually don’t (read: don’t) see independent pictures/limited releases because they aren’t in theaters near me (read: I can’t find them for free on the internet); b) I refuse to be a pretentious indie snob (read: I get enough attention from my parents and other people in my life that I don’t have a vacuous need for people to look at me and think “Wow, she watches indie films and is therefore a neat person!”); and c) the average American (read: the people who read this blog, with a couple of notable exceptions; if you’re one of the people who will comment vehemently about how you see indie films without being a pretentious indie snob, then congratulations, you’re one of the exceptions and also probably a pretentious indie snob) mostly only sees big name productions anyway and thus won’t have a clue when I talk about said indie films. Although, to be fair, I wouldn’t have a clue what I was talking about either. Also, the (relatively speaking) low budgets of indie films means that the people behind those films have to be creative in their use of money and will thus usually have a pretty original (but not necessarily good) film.)
In between fruitlessly searching for jobs (Look Mom and Dad! I gave this top billing because of how important it is to me!), learning without the annoying interference of the educational system, further enhancing my geek-chic pallor now that I don’t have to go outside to get meals, internet gaming, sleeping, and irritating the snot out of my mom because of the times of day and night that I do those last two, I have been staring forlornly at the abysmal list of soul-sucking crappy Hollywood summer blockbusters wishing that fall would hurry up and come already so that I can watch decent movies again. (Except then I looked at the fall movie line-up and the tiny part of my soul that still feels child-like joy and wonder wandered off into a corner to start cutting itself while plotting Michael Bay’s horrific death.)
Because I have no life, I sat down and looked at every single movie released this year up through the end of September (that is listed on Wikipedia for 2010) that was widely released, is slated for wide release, or (while not being declared one way or the other) is distributed by a big name company that makes it likely it will be widely released. All told, this description encompasses 95 films.
I separated these films into various categories of unoriginality. In the “Adaptation” category I made the subcategories of “Based on a “True” Story” (aka, adapted from real life and therefore not original), “Ruining the Book” (book adaptation), “Comic Con” (comic/comic book adaptation), “NPC (No Playable Characters) Video Game” (self-explanatory), and “Two Hour TV Episode” (also self-explanatory).
In the “Hollywood Will Shove It Down Your Throat ’til You Choke Category” we have the subcategories of “Milking it For All It’s Worth and Then Some” (Sequels) and “We Did Such a Good/Bad Job the First Time We Just Had to Try Again” (remakes).
In the “Hollywood Mad Libs” category there are the sub-categories of “Vomit From the Saccharine Unfunniness” (romance and rom coms, which ALL follow the same formula and are therefore unoriginal), and “Haven’t We Met Before” (generic tropes that get used over and over again that don’t fit in the “Vomit” sub-category.)
And finally, we have “MBS: Mind-Blowingly Stupid,” in which movies that might once have had original ideas in them are disqualified from being classified as “original” due to lacking intelligent or any other kind of thought or by having the word “Twilight” in the title.
I should also mention that there were two additional categories – “Benefit of the Doubt” (the movie hasn’t come out yet and from what I know about it can’t automatically be thrown into one of the above categories) and “Original* Recipe” (the movie is based on an original concept or takes an old concept and does something truly unique and original with that concept.)
*Original for a curved value of original; this is Hollywood, after all, not school, so they don’t have to be as careful about intellectual theft and plagiarism as real people.
I should also also mention that some of these movies applied to multiple categories, but to avoid double-counting they are in the category that best describes them; ie, RE: Afterlife is in the “sequel” category instead of “NPC Video Games” because at this point the franchise is so far away from the video games it’s more of a sequel than a video game movie and I will still see it anyway because I’m an idiot like that, and Twilight: Eclipse is in the MBS category instead of “Ruining the Book” because from what I know the movies are better than the books because the movies are shorter. I like run-on sentences.
Here’s the Tally:
This is a pie chart. I made it. Because I care enough about all of you to include colorful pictures with my diatribes.
Look at how many books people are going to pretend they can talk about like an expert now. I'm just kidding - most of these books were stupid to begin with. Two of them are Nicolas Sparks-brand toilet paper.
“True Story”: Eat Pray Love (based off of somebody’s memoirs), Letters to God (not based off of God’s memoirs)
“Ruining the Book”: Youth in Revolt, Dear John (for a guy who hates war so much, Channing Tatum really shouldn’t have done G.I. Joe), Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief, Alice in Wonderland (aka, Yet Another Reason Why Tim Burton Shouldn’t Have Been Allowed to Become a Big-Shot Director), Diary of a Wimpy Kid, The Last Song (aka, Watch Miley Fail), Ramona and Beezus (aka, How Long Do You Think It Will Take For Selena Gomez to Join Miley as a Tabloid Harlot), Charlie St. Cloud (OMG! I THINK ZAC EFFRON’S IN IT!!! SPARKLES AND PONIES AND GIGGLING!), The American, Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole (with a title like that, how can it lose?), Easy A (apparently it’s based on The Scarlet Letter, although God knows why anybody would want to turn that into a movie), The Town, How to Train Your Dragon (this movie didn’t ruin the book and was pretty awesome)
“NPC Video Game”: Prince of Persia: Jake Gyllenhaal’s Abs
“Two Hour TV Episode”: Edge of Darkness (aka, Watch Mel Fail to Entertain), MacGruber (according to the reviews I’ve read this movie isn’t even close to as bad as its box-office performance would make you think), The A-Team (while I love Rampage, I think they should have gotten Mr. T to reprise his role, but apparently the movie was funny enough to make up for everything), Avatar: The Last Airbender (why the frick did anyone let M. Night Shyamalan within a hundred mile radius of this project?), Sex and the City 2: Kim Cattrall is Older Now than One of the Golden Girls was During the First Season of that Show (fun fact: Rue McClanahan was in Starship Troopers – yes, that Starship Troopers – the one with the giant bugs)
“Comic Con”: Kick-Ass (which actually did), The Losers (I am so mad that I haven’t seen this yet), Jonah Hex (sadly, Megan Fox did not die in a stunt during the making of this movie), Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (aka I’m Getting Really Tired of Michael Cera in His Patented “Awkward Teen” Role and so Help Me This Movie Had Better Be Different)
That's what she said.
MIFAIWATS: Why Did I Get Married Too? (aka, Why Did Anyone Give Tyler Perry a License to Make Movies?), Iron Man 2 (Oh the double entendres I could make if my parents didn’t read this blog…), Shrek 4: God Please Let This Be the End, Get Him to the Greek (does anybody know why people think Jonah Hill is funny?), Toy Story 3: So Help Me if You Screw This Up, Pixar…, Predators (I’ll admit that I can’t wait to see this), Cats and Dogs: Bonus Points if Any of You Remember the First One Which Came Out in 2001, Step Up: 3-D (because I desperately need a feature length angsty break-dance performance – in 3D!!), Nanny McPhee Returns (to haunt my dreams with her puppy-and-kitten-killing-ugliness), Resident Evil: Afterlife (I realize that the fact that I own all three of the other Res Evils makes me part of the problem, not the solution, but I just can’t bring myself to care because of all the zombie-killing goodness), Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (which is apparently a sequel to Wall Street, which is a movie that came out in the 70s. Way to get the ball rolling on that one, guys.)
WDSAG/BJTFTWJHTTA: Wolfman (way scarier than Twilight), Repo Men (I don’t care what anyone else says – this movie is a remake (read: they stole the idea) of Repo! The Genetic Opera, which incidentally was awesome. Repo!, I mean, not Repo Men, which apparently had a terrible ending), Clash of the Titans (this movie pushed one of the plungers containing potassium chloride into the arm of 3-D movies), Nightmare on Elm Street (Jackie Earl Haley isn’t fit to lick Robert Englund’s boots), Robin Hood (which wasn’t even about Robert of Locksley and kinda really sucked), The Karate Kid: Jackie Chan Needs Money, The Sorceror’s Apprentice (because Disney thinks the world needs a full-length, live-action movie based on that five-minute scene in Fantasia starring Nic Cage; I will admit that when I’m sad I’ll watch the YouTube clip of him in The Wicker Man in that one scene where they pour bees on his face), Dinner for Schmucks (I have no idea but it’s a legit remake)
I think the most fun I've ever had with MadLibs is that one episode of Family Guy where Stewie plays MadLibs with Rupert. It was funny because he was doing what all little kids do with Mad Libs: putting dirty words in the blanks and then giggling about it.
“Vomit“: Leap Year (I love Amy Adams. But not in romance movies.), When in Rome (I really wish somebody would greenlight a “Veronica Mars” film already and let mainstream audiences see the not-annoying version of Kristin Bell), Valentine’s Day (it made my Valentine’s Day when I didn’t have to see this), She’s Out of My League (yes, yes she is), Our Family Wedding (this sounds like the name of a Tyler Perry film but isn’t), Remember Me (but whenever I remember you, Rob Pattinson, I have this overwhelming desire to kill you and then put glitter on your funeral pyre), The Bounty Hunter (why does Gerard Butler do this kind of movie? I only ever want to see Gerard Butler’s face when somebody’s butt needs kicking), Date Night (I love Tina Fey and Steve Carrell and by the way The Office needs to end), Just Wright (which was just wrong for critics because they hated this movie), Letters to Juliet (the title of this movie is a reference to a real-life group of nuns or whatever in Italy that answer letters that pathetic love-sick girls write to Juliet Capulet. Yes, that Juliet Capulet – Mrs. I-Will-Kill-Myself-Over-The-Guy-I’ve-Known-Literally-For-Less-Than-Eighteen-Hours Monatgue of Romeo and Juliet who absolutely is qualified to give relationship advice), The Switch (no idea), Going The Distance (no idea)
“Haven’t We Met Before?”: Extraordinary Measures (Harrison Ford and Brendan Fraser vs. children’s illness), Brooklyn’s Finest (another angsty cop movie), Green Zone (another CIA movie for Matt Damon), Oceans (Disney’s annual animal documentary), Untitled Vampire Spoof (I don’t know if the work is actually untitled so far or if that is the title, but either way, it’s going to suck (hah!)), From Paris With Love (more spy crap), Death at a Funeral (one of those “we all pull together in the end” sort of deals. I think), The Crazies (campy horror), Tooth Fairy (Dwayne Johnson emasculating himself for another movie)
I believe that between the three of them, Twilight, Sex and the City 2, and Marmaduke contain everything you need to know about why our society will eventually collapse underneath the weight of its own stupidity. Although, to the credit of women everywhere, SATC 2 did badly enough that they aren't going to shove a third one down our throats. Sarah Jessica Parker was crushed. (She actually was - it's pretty hilarious how upset she was at the news. Yes, I do know what schadenfreude means. I can also spell it correctly on the first try.)
“MBS”: Cop Out (Kevin Smith got all huffy when critics panned this and essentially likened criticizing his movie to criticizing retarded children), The Back-Up Plan (why do people let J.Lo in movies anymore? At this point in time she’s just about the best way to kill the box-office), Furry Vengeance (Brendan Fraser has no dignity), Killers (apparently a lot of people hate both Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl so maybe putting them in a really boring and crappy movie together wasn’t a good idea), Legion (decent idea that was executed about as well as the Russians executed Robespierre (incidentally I hear they’re making a movie about him, too)), Marmaduke (the only good thing that can be said about this train wreck is that the dog doesn’t die at the end. Actually, now that I think about it, I’m not sure that’s a good thing), Sex and the City 2 (crap, I just realized I may have counted this twice; oh well, it sucks enough that I’ll throw it on here twice), Twilight: Eclipse (if I wanted to watch a sparkly vampire I would throw glitter on my TV and watch any of the following (more awesome in every conceivable way) vampires: Angel, Spike, Dracula, Alucard, John Mitchell, Nosferatu, Blade, Nikola Tesla, Selene, The Count from Sesame Street, etc.)
**This movie doesn't get as much credit as the others because Roman Polanski directed it and I'm one of those people that checks the news daily to see if somebody's offed that megadouche.
“Original* Recipe”: Daybreakers (while it wasn’t that great of a film, I bet you can’t name a vampire story in which the vampires have already taken over the world that also provides scathing social commentary), The Book of Eli (post-apocalyptic has been done before, but nobody’s done it with The Denzel before), Shutter Island (yeah, it was original. I still think Leonardo diCaprio and Martin Scorsese need to break up, though), The Ghost Writer (this was made overseas because Roman Polanski can’t enter the US without being arrested because he’s the scale on which other douchebags are measured), Hot Tub Time Machine (I defy you to name me anything, ever, from which this could have been ripped off; shockingly, I have heard that this movie flirts with the adjective “good”), Splice (science run-amok movie that has family values messages), Inception (I can’t even being to explain to you what’s going on in this movie, but Ellen Page is in it, and it got fantastic reviews.)
So what does this all mean, aside from the fact that most people would think I have way too much time on my hands?
It means that by and large, Hollywood is pretty creatively bankrupt. If they aren’t endlessly tacking on sequels or adapting everything and its brother (I don’t mind all adaptations; I am pretty excited about X-Men: First Class coming out, but does anybody really think that Prince of Persia needed a movie?) they seem to just be trotting out the same tropes with different (and sometimes the same) actors over and over again. Honestly, when was the last time you saw a new movie and went “WOW!”? It’s been a long while for me, too.
Now, unoriginal movies aren’t necessarily bad movies and original movies aren’t necessarily good movies; in fact, some of the movies in the MBS category are arguably Original* Recipes but are so bloody stupid that I disqualified them. The thing is that unoriginal movies are mostly mediocre movies and I have had it up to here with mediocre movies that are utterly forgettable. In this economy I guess it’s just too much to ask a studio to go out on a limb with an intriguing idea and give a director or screenwriter some leeway to attempt to work some magic. I am reminded of something that my speech coach, Mr. B, once said before a speech tournament: “Don’t be afraid to take chances. It’s okay if you crash and burn – I just want to see people go out there and make choices and take chances.” Hollywood studios are terrified of having a flop because for some of them, one false move means that they’ll be going out of business. I know MGM is really on the ropes at the moment, and a lot of other studios are suffering too.
Yeah, there’s a recession, yeah, internet piracy’s a problem, yeah movie tickets are ridiculously overpriced, etc. etc. But you know what? Some of it is due to the FACT that Hollywood has been dishing out a lot of crap recently.
“Vomit”: Leap Year (I love Amy Adams. But not in romance movies.), When in Rome (I really wish somebody would greenlight a “Veronica Mars” film already and let mainstream audiences see the not-annoying version of Kristin Bell), Valentine’s Day (it made my Valentine’s Day when I didn’t have to see this), She’s Out of My League (yes, yes she is), Our Family Wedding (this sounds like the name of a Tyler Perry film but isn’t), Remember Me (but whenever I remember you, Rob Pattinson, I have this overwhelming desire to kill you and then put glitter on you funeral pyre), The Bounty Hunter (why does Gerard Butler do this kind of movie? I only ever want to see Gerard Butler’s face when somebody’s butt needs kicking), Date Night (I love Tina Fey and Steve Carrell and by the way The Office needs to end), Just Wright (which was just wrong for critics because they hated this movie), Letters to Juliet (the title of this movie is a reference to a real-life group of nuns or whatever in Italy that answer letters that pathetic love-sick girls write to Juliet Capulet. Yes, that Juliet Capulet – Mrs. I-Will-Kill-Myself-Over-The-Guy-I’ve-Known-Literally-For-Less-Than-Eighteen-Hours Monatgue of Romeo and Juliet), The Switch (no idea), Going The Distance (no idea)
Things I Like and Other Miscellaneous Musings 