This is where I come from

God this is infuriating. The dipshit said this a while ago, but I just saw it again here, headlining a very anti-american blog chronicling the dead from both sides of the war.

"The story of what we've done in the postwar period is remarkable. ... It is a better and more important story than losing a couple of soldiers every day."

Who said that? Representative George Nethercutt (R), the voice for my hometown in this nation's Legislature. Sickening.

That's not exactly the whole context, and he surely didn't intend it to be that pointed. Regardless, I'm sure he meant what he said. This doesn't make him evil or a murderer, just blind to the fundamental flaws in the pro-war position.

Read the full thing here.

I want to be an adjective

I was just thinking about this while drafting a longer blog. I want to one day be important enough to the world of literature, film, journalism, philosophy--anything, I'm not picky--to have my name adjectivized. I want someone to read someone else's work and proclaim it "Baumgartenian."

Now that I think of it, one of my roommates in college put this seed in my head to begin with. His last name is better suited adjectification.

Ideally, I'd like this to be a positive adjective, something that commands instant respect. Looking at my body of work thus far, though, I'd be happy with it becoming a synonym for overwrought or tedious.

"Ugh, X's new Y was so contrived it was almost Baumgartenian--though not as long and directionless. I wouldn't have been able to stay awake if the indulgent characterization hadn't made the bile surge at the back of my throat." -- Some Reviewer.

Yes, that would do nicely

Read the full thing here.

While playing Risk, Saddam Hussein hoarded all his troops in Australia

Here is an expose on the tactics U.S. intelligence used in their attempts to break Saddam Hussein and locate the WMDs. It comes from http://www.independent.co.uk/, which appears to be a regular Brit newspaper--probably skewing to the left.

There's mostly real news, but some funny stuff like this too.

Read the full thing here.

I tried really hard

I just can't put together a decent sentence tonight. This is disappointing, I had some pretty important stuff to devote way too many words to.

For instance, I think I'm the only person in the world that noticed Phil LaMarr is an extra in Spiderman 2. I'm sure you caught all the other cameos, including the loser Raimi brother begging for any bit part Sam would give him. Bet you missed Phil though.

This is probably only portentious to me, but if the least funny actor on a perenially underachieving sketch comedy show can sink low enough to walkon as an extra, then the economy is much worse off than I'd ever imagined. The producers of Samurai Jack and Futurama must pay their voice talent in play money. Look for Phil on disaster-bound mass transit, slack-jawed directly to the right of Spiderman as the web-slinger stops the elevated train from de-elevating.

I think I caused a tumult in the theatre, cackling as Tobey McGuire fought to save thousands upon thousands of people from doom. In my defense, I would have laughed without seeing Phil LaMarr, as Tobey's trying really hard to stop this train face looks just like a wishbone passing sideways through the lower colon face. Some acting coach should tell him that general exertion is a different face than a painful bowel movement.

If they were the same, weightlifting in all its forms would be a much more satisfying spectator sport.

I also thought I caught a Stan Lee cameo. An old guy with biggish hair and horn-rimmed glasses pulls someone out of the way of a hunk of falling building. I also thought I saw him at my cousin's wedding in Stockton, California, so take both sitings with a grain of salt.

Here's a heads-up. If you the only thing you like more than funk and fetishism is the crooning of Elton John, then you should buy or download the Scissor Sisters. This apparently belongs to a sub-genre of music called perv pop, and I like it. It's what Sir Elton and Prince might come up with if they were locked in a room together with a gimp--only gayer.

I wanted to discuss all those things at length, I just couldn’t make anything come out funny. I’m as disappointed as you are.

Read the full thing here.

Democratic National Sleep Aid

I've watched the DNC for a grand total of 18 seconds, long enough to see Teresa Heinz Kerry fight a losing battle with the English language. Her fight was much like the one I fight daily in this blog. It struck a chord.

That was the only thing that struck me, and the experience lasted 16 seconds too long. The other two are null because that's how long it took my brain to realize what I was watching. If I had quicker reflexes or even a remote control it could have been over much sooner.

It's an affront to my senses and an assault on my decency. It would surely make Ignatius J Reilly's valve close off forever. Of course, I'm not one of the > 50% or whatever of people who don't know what the fuck Kerry stands for. For these people the DNC might be useful.

The 18 seconds thing was actually a lie, I watched the NBC news broadcast before the start of the convention. The thing that struck me then was how jubilant these people were pretending to be. They were acting like John Kerry was some leftist messiah. He's not obviously. He's the defacto placeholder that is least offensive to the most people and therefore stands the best chance of being swept to office on the wave of anti-Bush sentiment. That's why I'll be voting for him.

You know you have problems connecting with voters when your running mate--that is vice presidential pick--has a 24-point higher approval rating than you do. I wonder what this guy's approval ratings are. He's Kerry Edwards. Look at that smile. Is he some kind of sexy African-American synthesis of the two men? Probably, and it looks like he's going to be rich soon. Maybe we should rethink our nominee.

Every analyst I hear spouts the same mantra: Kerry has to ignite the base. This is probably true, but unrealistic and a little unfair. Asking him to electrify America is as futile as asking the same of a lightning rod. He's no orator. He's wordier than I am. Don't be stupid George Stephanopoulos. You have a giant head, use it.

I do feel a little cheated though, John Kerry actually excited me once. It was probably almost two years ago now. I was living in what passes for the ghetto of Spokane, Washington. We rented a big house with bars on the windows. The bars couldn't keep prowlers out of the gaping holes in the crumbling foundation. Luckily most of the foundation was obscured by hundreds of rosebushes, which inexplicably bloomed 9 months out of the year. It was an oddly magical house, and one that stank of cat piss. 

The previous tenant's wife fell in with some sort of sex cult and had left him with four children and no second income. He was one person and could barely manage the rent. Later, we would be six people and would still barely manage the rent.

Needless to say, the poor guy had some shit on his mind, and forwarding magazine subscriptions didn't have top priority. He moved and got himself a more managable life; We got his subscription to Men's Journal.

On the cover of this particular issue, August 2002, Kerry sat astride a Harley-Davidson in a fringed black leather jacket. He talked about interesting things, said that if he decided to run, it'd be nice if John McCain, his buddy, would run with him. The Bi-Partisanism he hinted at in the article was kind of nice. He seemed intent on unifying the country. He took stands on issues, he was vocal and--though this might just be clever editing--he was concise. He seemed to have something approaching the charisma of Bill Clinton, which is good, as no one ignited the base like Bill Clinton. Of course, Clinton was also a winner--which tends to fire up a group of consistent losers.

Granted, Kerry might have just seemed more promising. back then it was much less likely that anyone was going to have a chance against Bush. In those days I often found myself staring longingly at pictures of history's greatest murderer. Maybe my judgement was impaired. Thankfully though, the President has fucked up anything he's ever touched, and all the best spin in the world won't change that.

Quick question: when did beady-eyed Joe Scarborough stop being such a thoughtless firebrand? I hate this guy for the same reasons I hate Michael Moore, Michael Savage, Al Franken and Anne Coulter, though not as much because he's not as stupid as some of that group nor as loud an absurd as the three who aren't Al Franken. I meant that sentence to imply that Al Franken is just plain stupid . . . I don't know if that came across. Yet, here is Scarborough not spouting biased polemics laced with jokes that entertain like partial-birth abortions. This has to be a trick. He shows his colors a little more in that previous link. "Hardblogger" is only a week old though, and those appear to be his only two posts, so time will tell.

Read the full thing here.

Hand-wringing 101

How does one develop passion? Is there a handbook? I feel like I’ve been deprived of a basic rule set of human existence. Certain parts of the game are unclear to me.

This is the shit 16 year olds worry about. Does being 23 mean that I’m behind the curve or that I’m hung up completely? I still don’t know these answers and I don’t know if I’m going to be able to recognize them if I find them.

I’ve seen Lost in Translation probably a half dozen times; it’s a movie that resonates strongly with me. I really only think I’ve seen it twice. I should watch it a few more times before writing something like this, but who has the time? I would, if I didn't waste so much of it. 

Charlotte and I are similar characters. Red-headed philosophy majors with comparably sized breasts.

Like the best escapism, it starts by entering into a common dialogue with the viewers it affects.

We’re both awash in a world not our own. It’s all very sad and languorous. Familiar, that.

Of course Charlotte has the benefit of a jet set to spurn. They're trendy, insipid. They’re beneath her. Who do I have to spurn? Nobody. You have to be part of something in order to turn your back on it. Maybe I need a semi-famous spouse to become disillusioned with. Then I can spend weeks lying around a Japanese hotel room in my underwear. Maybe then I'll get some perspective.

She’s also lucky in that she has a loose three act structure from which to draw direction. Even if that direction is to be, for ninety minutes, totally without direction, it’s still something.

That’s the calling card of good postmodern cinema: the same weepy despair, the same lack of cohesion with the world at large, but in an exotic location populated by hip people with good hair.

Like Mark Ruffalo’s coiffure in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. To . . . Die . . . For.

"I wish I was adrift in that sea of despair."

Like they say, the water is always blue-greener on the other side.

Truthfully I’m drawn to these kinds of movies because they find a way to authenticate the gentle, aimless loathing I feel and romanticize it at the same time. That’s the trick I’m increasingly unable to do without help. The romanticizing. I used to be much better at it. I think this means I’m losing my imagination. Maybe I’m just losing my youth.

One existentialist or another—pretty much all of them really—thought of birth as absolute freedom, a more or less limitless spectrum of possibility. It’s as close as you'll ever get to a point of infinity. There is almost nothing you can’t do—except, as the saying goes, pick your parents.

Then something happens. You make a precognitive decision, you spit up on someone's shoulder, your parents name you, you come out breach, whatever. You become imbedded in the world. A choice has been made, an event imposes itself on you, and that absolute freedom gets a big chunk taken out of it. All those things that might have happened if you were named George are fucked because you’re Cecil. Your freedom is narrowed and you can’t really get it back. Even changing your name to George won’t let you reinvest the Cecil years. Life is full of events like this, more and less important ones. More than that though, life is the sum of these events, all events, and that’s really it. It’s an inevitable move, from freedom to helotry. The thing that makes Existentialism the supposed antidote to the horrible crippling despair of determinism (evolution et al) is that you have an occasional voice in how your freedom is taken from you. That’s not how they spin it of course, but that’s what it boils down to. And that’s what sucks about modernism. On one hand, there may be no freedom at all, despite what you may think. That’s determinism and it’s probably the more frightening prospect. In the best case scenario though you only really get to pick the doors you get locked out of.

This is the new optimism and it sucks.

There’s no more transcendence--maybe we’re just realizing there never was in the first place. You can’t get freer.

There can be no transcendence without a god, but gods are pointless without humanity to worship them, and still it seems, no humanity as we define ourselves without at least the idea of transcendence—the idea of freedom. So which came first? That seems to be the crux and crucial difference between all world views, religions and whatnot. Which came first? Either a god created man and implicit in that creation comes transcendence, or man created transcendence and needed a god to work out the logistics. This seems to be the real trinity.

Even the existentialists wanted transcendence, and got as close as they could get to it.

Does this have something to do with my lost imagination? I don’t know anyone who isn’t a goddamned liar who thinks they’ve become more imaginative with age. Does imagination fade as a matter of course or as a matter of survival? Who wants to be the guy that can extrapolate all those lost opportunities? I couldn’t get anything done if I could see past the countless doors that have closed on me. At the same time, can you think of a better way to describe transcendence? Seeing through closed doors? Isn’t that just imagination? Is that all we’ve got to raise ourselves up? It makes sense in this context to think of imagination as the most transcendent part of ourselves. And we lose it.

What does that  say about the ability to attack something with passion? If passion here means “a strong liking or desire for or devotion to some activity, object, or concept,” then how do we come to be devoted to an object or idea? Do you just get whittled down until there’s only one thing left to occupy you?

Does that then become your passion and the thing you pursue? It’s bleak but I can’t really get my head around anything else.

So then, is it good that I don’t know what I want to be good at? Does that mean I’m more free? Or am I just hobbled by indecision, by a lack of clarity?

Sometimes it feels more like the latter. Other times it’s the former.

One thing I think I’m sure of: passion isn’t archetypal, it’s contextual. As Charlotte loses the only thing she’s been passionate about maybe ever—and before she’s had a chance to really embrace it—you feel more hope for her than grief, like maybe passion is just a matter of stumbling through the right doors until you’re at the right place and time to meet the object of that moment’s passion. That’s Sophia Coppola’s big contribution with this movie.

And maybe that’s a better way of looking at the new optimism.

This reads like some reading response I would have written in college. It feels like old times. Maybe I'm transcending . . . or just remaining obstinately immature.

Read the full thing here.

Mitigating my shaky-cam hatred

I've discussed this with a friend and I didn't really make it known that shaky-cam has a place. For example Gladiator and Saving Private Ryan, despite how I made it sound, were good uses of shaky cam.

It also may have started more with Heat, which I don't remember really but Michael Mann has always done the handheld Soderbergh thing, so that's not so hard to believe.

The problem is that, as I mentioned, it's become zeitgeist. It's hip, so people use it in bad places.

Bad places like in a climactic fight between two trained killers. These men know what they're doing. I want to see them pick each other apart piece by piece. I don't want to hear an "oooof" and wonder if Damon just broke homeboy's knee or poked his eye out.

A carefully choreographed fight scene is wasted on shaky-cam antics. Granted the Bourne fight scene isn't meant to be Kill Bill vol 3, as it employs the same 'imperfection' that makes the rest of the movie so good. It's a gritty scene. Spit flies, eyes bug out. It's down and dirty. So maybe a little shakey is good. But when 15 seconds of a scene is devoted to Damon's spasmodically lurching right thigh I say "Meh"--regardless of how sexy that thigh may be. When even running down the street get's the shaky treatment I start to get annoyed.

It should be a tool to exploit, not a gimmick upon which to to build 120 minutes of film.

Read the full thing here.

I like to watch movies

Brian Cox does something for the niche role of the grizzled CIA mucky muck that I will measure all future clandestine bureaucrats against. Unlike so much that is wrong with action movies, and so much of what is right with the Bourne Supremacy, there's nothing archetypal about his character.

He’s not righteous in the face of evil. He’s not pure evil himself. He’s not a double agent.

He’s greedy, he’s out to cover his own ass, he seems tubercular. He has constructed a grandiose self-image to beat back his pangs of conscious. He’s human.

Brian Cox is never the star of any movie I’ve seen him in, but he’s usually the brightest spot.

It’s articulate characterization like this that makes the Bourne Supremacy work despite the annoying inconsistencies that plague all action movies.

There’s a part early on. This bugged the hell out of me; you’re going to think I’m crazy. Jason is in India, laying low. He’s got a bungalow, he’s got a cute German girlfriend, he's "off the grid", he’s living the life. Then Jason sees him, the guy he’s never seen before. This guy, Bourne knows, is there--in that country, on that subcontinent--just to kill him. How does he know this?

“It’s all wrong, he’s dressed all wrong, that car’s all wrong.” True, he’s white, has a sniper rifle flung over his shoulder, and it’s a gleaming new Kia Optima. Way out of place.

That's just good sleuthing.

About 45 minutes later we’re following the CIA operatives at work in Germany. They’re acting very stealthily. They slink out of their hotel. They mouth something into their cufflinks. They have trench coats and don’t look German in the least. They nonchalantly look both ways before getting into their . . . Chryslers?

Here is where I ask the film makers to take advice from their own goddamned script. I know nothing about the spy trade, but I know that if I’m a German bad guy, and I see a half dozen suits get into a half dozen jet black Dodge Caravans, I walk the other way. I’m not exaggerating. Dodge Caravans. The CIA field office in Berlin thought it better to ship a bunch of American-made minivans rather than buying a fleet of CITROËN like everybody else.

A few minutes later, Bourne steals his German assassin friend's Jeep Cherokee. It's not enough that, against all odds, clandestine American operatives drive American minivans, but Director Paul Greengrass expects us to believe their German counterparts are driving American SUVs as well? There could be a unicorn wearing a monocle riding shotgun and we couldn’t get any deeper into FantasyLand.

Right, Jeep and Dodge are all Chrysler, which is owned by Daimler, a German Company. But I’ve been to Germany. Number of Chrysler’s I saw there? Fuckall.

I understand marketing is an important way for producers to recoup the costs of making a big-budget film. What is unforgivable is letting product placement get in the way of characterization and common sense.

The other big problem I have with this movie is the cinematography. God how I despise the shaky-cam action sequence. I don’t know who started this. I think I saw it first in Gladiator, or maybe Saving Private Ryan. As much as I like him, Spielberg should be hung from the top floor of DreamWorks SKG by his flowing pepper gray hair until he apologizes for setting the frenetic, over-caffeinated, jiggle-tron zeitgeist upon an unsuspecting world. It’s not that I’m missing what the shaky fight scene is trying to do. I understand it's purpose: frantic realism. I like realism. But when I choose between realistic cinema and putting off that next grand mal seizure, I choose the latter.

I’m picking at these details because I liked the movie a lot.

I wanted perfection. In the end though, what I ended up liking the most was its dogged imperfection. Not the stuff above, that’s still just stupid. I’m talking about the problem that thrillers have of trying to attain total completeness. We’ll call it the Usual Suspects syndrome (see also: The Game syndrome). You take a convoluted-ass plot and three dozen characters you don’t think anyone will ever be able to wade through, much less wrap their heads around, bring everything to a boil, then drop the pieces one by one into the audience’s lap. QED. In the above two movies that was fun, and done well. In the deluge of films that have done it since, I haven’t been as impressed.

Luckily Greengrass doesn’t fall into that trap. There aren’t any epiphanies, there aren’t any archetypal struggles of good vs evil, Bourne never dangles above a tank of piranhas while Cox dictates his whole maniacal plan. These are all very, very good things, though I’m sure that most people will see a flaw where I see strength.

The plot wasn’t taught enough.

Taught and thriller appear together so often they’ve become synonymous. That bugs the hell out of me. There’s nothing taught about real life, even at it’s most thrilling. The pieces never really fit right. Screenwriter Gilroy seems to get this. Good for him.

There’s also a surprisingly great chase scene. All chase scenes have the good and bad guys slamming into each other. This one has the good and bad guys pinballing a third motorist between them pong-style. I also liked how, despite his status as uber-agent, Bourne’s driving isn’t perfect. He screws up, he gets tagged by oncoming traffic. He does some amazing things, but he also gets blindsided by a truck—not the bad guy’s truck.

As I said, comparing The Bourne Supremacy to Shakespeare is stupid. I’m with Comrade Snowball on this one: Each movie to the best of its ability. Don’t fault the retarded kid for not knowing how to read, it’s a good day when he makes it through lunch without choking on his applesauce.

The Bourne Supremacy made it all the way through second recess and back home for the day without losing its mittens or running off to masturbate behind the Special Needs Annex. As action movies go, that’s brilliant.

Read the full thing here.