Saturday Morning Movies

  • HRC - Rumor has it that Hillary may be Barack’s top choice for Secretary of State. Given the fact that we’re more than two months short of inauguration, much less Senate confirmation hearings, the whole thing strikes me as a bit peremptory. At the same time, I’m a bit surprised to hear so little protest at the idea that the cabinet could be filled with elected officials rather than professionals from each position’s respective field. Did someone important fail to recognize the election results as a mandate for, above all, competency? (This is not to say that Senator Clinton is incompetent, but that there may be individuals more specifically suited to discharging the duties of the Secretary of State.)
  • Review - Any position I might take regarding Forgetting Sarah Marshall will necessarily be colored by the continued aesthetic pleasure this movie offers. Judd Apatow may not have written this flick, but his impact as a producer is clear. On the subject of writing, I actually wondered how Jason Segel landed a role more appropriate for Stifler until I realized that Segel, as the sole credited writer, must’ve attached himself as an actor when selling the script, much as occurred in the cases of Good Will Hunting and My Big Fat [Crappy Movie]. At 112 minutes, this one’s a little long, but there are plenty of good laughs and plenty of gratuitous screen time for Mila Kunis and Kristen Bell. I think it’s safe to say that Jackie and V. Mars have grown up.
  • Review - In preparation for the Grant Park celebration, PBS’s Independent Lens ran Chicago 10, a documentary remembering the Chicago 7, on the last Wednesday in October. Thus, I found it while digging through my DVR in search of something unrelated to procedural drama. While most of its value is historical and its viewpoint is slightly more partisan than Donna Brazile, Chicago 10 does a good job of showing how systemic repression parallels leprosy: defense causes more damage than the actual infection.
    Rage Against the Machine fans should prepare to be distracted by the soundtrack. I had to replay nearly five minutes of early animated re-enactment because, in my head, I was singing along to the instrumental version of “Wake Up.”

2008 11 15

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Remember the NFL Tonight

  • Palin - Since losing her bid for the vice-presidency, Sarah Palin has hit the metaphorical party circuit, doing guest appearances on everything from The Today Show to Larry King Live. I suppose this was inevitable, but both the voters in Alaska must be wondering who’s been left to watch the store. She’s now been campaigning outside the state for roughly 7% of her term as governor.
    What’s a bit more disturbance than the neglect of her job is the way she appears to have believed her own line of campaign nonsense. In at least two clips yesterday, Palin either questioned whether Obama understood that terrorists are a security risk or directly mentioned how distraught she is by his connection to Chicago educator Bill Ayers. Apparently someone forgot to cc her on the “Lose with dignity and try not to cause civil unrest” memo.
  • Gasoline - The gas station nearest my home is currently selling regular unleaded for $1.95/gallon, which makes it substantially cheaper than milk. If only the human body could digest octane, soup kitchens and homeless shelters would become substantially more flammable. That’s not my only point.
    How are we supposed to encourage sustainable energy development if global recession continues to drive gas prices down? Personally, I’m starting to come around on the idea of some sort of government-set price floor, as advocated by the unnecessarily annoying Thomas Friedman. Artificially high gas prices would provide the populace with material motivation to conserve while affording the government a lucrative supply of revenue, which could then be distributed to sustainability efforts.
    [Note: While this forum may occasionally agree with Mr. Friedman, such should not be assumed as its default position. Sure, he's a good leftist, but he tends to go off book-writing a bit half-cocked, and his unending attempts to bring phrases of his own coinage into the popular lexicon are unbearable, at best.]
  • Colbert - My stance on marriage is pretty simple: Best of luck to anyone fool enough to do it. The opinion of not-so-young Americans voiced by Dan Savage during his segment on The Colbert Report is shared, I suspect, by more people than might say so in mixed company.
  • Pickens - During his appearance on The Daily Show, T. Boone Pickens did much to make me think he’s less of a crackpot than his backwoods name might imply. Not long ago, I was railing against The Pickens Plan because moving from petroleum to natural gas as the prime source of motive power diminishes our current petroleum-related problems without taking any steps toward eliminating them while creating problems of its own. In the above-linked clip, however, you’ll notice that Pickens proposes shifting heavy transportation, such as tractor-trailers and buses, to natural gas while continuing to move consumer transportation, such as cars and motorcycles, toward electricity, which could then be derived from sustainable sources. The amount of sense that makes does much to assuage my fears that America was under intellectual attack from an immensely wealthy idiot.

2008 11 13

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Utter Nonsense

  • Progression - After seeing The Sicilian from The Princess Bride preparing to shack up with Eleanor Waldorf the other night, I thought it might be amusing to see how the world might look if actors were only allowed to play one character.
    • The eponymous Buffy the Vampire Slayer went on to play tennis at Eastern State University before being kidnapped by Charlie Sheen. One wonders how a vampire slayer gets kidnapped by a feckless small-time crook.
    • Her college boyfriend, quarterback Joe Kane, somehow ended up in Tree Hill, where his father must have led a full life before becoming a fall-down drunk in whatever college town houses ESU, romantically attached to Brendan Frasier’s former roommate, who’s calmed a lot since Harvard.
    • Kane’s backfield companion, Darnell Jefferson, changed his name and completed his “poor black kid makes good” story by becoming a doctor in New Jersey, where none of the many white people ever discuss football.
    • Similarly, the Senator’s daughter who Buffalo Bill intended to flay (”It puts the lotion on its skin!”) grew to become a belatedly lesbian cardiothoracic surgeon in Seattle. No one seems to know about her past trauma, but she’s still a bit jumpy.
    • One hates to break a rhetorical convention, but I just don’t know what to do with the cast connections between Lost and Saw. I guarantee that anyone attempting to watch the latter after seeing the former will continue wondering first why the Asian cop doesn’t just ask the resident ghosts what happened and then how anyone successfully out-masterminded Ben Linus. That’s just plain impossible.
    • Also, how many viewers of Criminal Minds - I know there aren’t many - kept waiting for Inigo Montoya to strap on his scabbard and sally forth in search of the six-fingered man? Maybe if he’d done so, he wouldn’t have been written off the show.

    While I’m certain there are many more such connections, these are the first that come to mind. Feel encouraged to hitherto contribute your own favorites as comments on this post.

  • Sort - The world is aflutter with Obamanian exuberance, but the final post on Slate’s Big Sort might help lend some perspective. Then again, the fact that the presidency changed parties in 2000 and 2008 seems an unaddressed contradiction to Bishop’s premise of a progressive geo-political sort. I’ll read the book when it’s issued in paperback.
  • Mission - Yesterday morning, a Jehovah’s Witness knocked on my door with the apparent intent to inform me of Jesus. After nearly a dozen hours of wakefulness, I had little patience or appetite for heresy, so I politely(?) accepted her leaflet, informed her of my non-belief, and locked the door. That struck me as an adequately cordial sequence of action, but I’m unfamiliar with proper etiquette for dealing with someone who’s disturbed my home for the purpose of implicitly insulting my perception of reality. I suspect that, in many parts of the world, this procedure involves machetes and/or firearms.

2008 11 12

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