Radioactive Communist Zombies

Oscar Nominees

This year there are ten best picture nominees for the Academy Awards (Oscars).  Which I believe is double the usual, previous number.  What's also interesting is the number of the nominees I've actually seen.  Usually its one to zero.  This year it's four.  I've seen:

1. District 9 (I liked)
2. The Hurt Locker (I really liked)
3. A Serious Man (I didn't like)
4. Up (I liked)

And . . . four other of the movies are in my Netflix queue:

1. Avatar
2. The Blind Side
3. An Education
4. Up in the AIr

Which leaves Quentin Tarantino's "Inglorious Basterds" and "Precious" as movies I don't want to see.

Now I heard that they increased the number of Best Picture nominees in order to increase the popularity of the Oscars, i.e., bring in more viewers.   It almost seems as if they chose some of the nominees that way ("Up"? for best picture?).

So will I watch the Oscars?  Probably not.   

Tobacco Row

Go to the bottom of this webpage: http://incrediblehulk.marvel.com/ 

There you find the rating (PG-13) and the justification:

Sequences of intense action violence, frightening sci-fi images, and brief suggestive content. 

But then at the very bottom of the screen, in a big box is "THIS FILM CONTAINS DEPICTIONS OF TOBACCO CONSUMPTION."

So now we are being warned that movies contain smoking?   What's next, over eating?

The denizens of the nanny state are looking out for us still.  Doesn't that make you feel warm and fuzzy inside?

Kind of make me want to have a cigarette. 

Yet Another Unintended Consequence

Movie ticket prices are going up this summer and the reason is: subsidized and mandated ethanol.

In the June 16th issue of National Review (NRODT; subscription required) it's reported that with "With federal ethanol shenanigans" the price of corn has gone up, that has caused the price of popcorn to go up.  Since popcorn is a major revenue source for movie theaters, delining profits margins from the sale of popcore has required increased prices for movie tickets to make up the difference (guess they can't raise the price of popcorn from its already outragous levels).  Reports NR:

Richard Gil, an economist at the University of Santa Cruz, studies the movie business and predicts that moviegoers will pay an extra buck or two for a ticket by the end of the year.

So, see what happens when you drop an economic boulder like the ethanol boondoggle into a market pond: the waves splash unexpected places. 

Of course, this is just a minor result of the ethanol scam (higher prices for food, gasohol, tax and consumer dollars being directed to politically connected corporations and individuals, increasing the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, and increased air pollution are some of the other results).  But it's a lesson in the dangers of hubris of Washington's desire to direct the economy centrally.  You can't control the unseen and unforeseen consequences of economic tinkering.  So best to leave markets to themselves.

And let ethanol die on the vine. 

Very Long Wait

On Christmas Eve last year I complained that Netflix was "throttling" me by not sending me new releases.  I even showed the top part of my queue:

As you can see, there were six movies on "wait" and most on "Very Long Wait."

Well, an update.  I have now recieved every movie that was on wait, all after a long wait and most after a very long wait.  Here is a table of how long I had to wait for each movie:

The minimum wait was 7 weeks from release date ("The Simpsons Movie").  The longest "Very Long Wait" was 13 weeks 2 days for "Live Free or Die Hard."

That is a very long "Very Long Wait."

The average wait was 69.5 days, or just under 10 weeks.

This is how Netflix punishes you for watching too many movies.  Caveat emptor. 

Tuesday Night Ramble

Right now I just don't feel driven to blog.

Weekend was great as I drove on the racetrack again in the new car (see here and here).  A better driver could get that car to go a lot faster but I keep chickening out and braking early and not flooring the gas.  Only time I floored it was on the straight-away and sometimes coming out of turn 2 and turn 6 (I know, you have no idea what those numbers mean).  But the car picked up speed so fast I didn't have to floor it.  The brakes are phenomenal but I needed to learn to trust them.

The news is boring.  Ann Coulter did remind me of one thing I don't like about Fred Thompson (to add to the fact he supported McCain-Fiengold): He voted against impeachment for Bill Clinton.

In 1999, Sen. Fred Thompson joined legal giants like Sens. Jim Jeffords, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins to vote against removing Bill Clinton from office for perjury.

Thompson, whom President Nixon once called "dumb as hell," claimed to have carefully studied the Constitution and determined that perjury by the president of the United States did not constitute "high crimes and misdemeanors." He must have been looking at one of those living, breathing Constitutions we've heard so much about.

So now I'm a bit less enamored with Senator Thompson.  But I'm even less enamored with the rest of the GOP crew.

Just watched "Transformers."  Entertaining movie (Micheal Bay directed and he is such a manipulative director) but I do get tired of the military and intelligence branches of the government portrayed negatively as either incompetent or fascist stormtroopers (or both).

So that's Tuesday.  

300

I watched "300" last night.  (I know, I'm way behind the curve here.)

Great movie, and beautiful in Blu-Ray.

The last line of the movie is:

The enemy outnumber us a paltry 3 to 1, a match for any Greek. This day we rescue a world from mysticism and tyranny and usher in a world brighter than anything we can imagine, Give thanks, men, to Leonidas and the brave 300! TO VICTORY!

"Mysticism and tyranny" sounds a lot like what we are battling in Iraq and the War on Terror.  The Islamofacists don't believe in representative government (people might vote for things Allah disapproves of such as free speech) and want to rule the world with the mysticism of their religion.

The 300 Spartans that fought a million Persians at Thermopylae and slowed them down for three days died protecting freedom, died to stop Persian king Xerxes from enslaving the Greek city-states.

Twenty-five hundred years later, we are still fighting against the same things and yet there are those who think peace is possible with tyranny without bloodshed.

Those who forget history are doomed.

The defeat of the Spartans at the "hot gates" rallied the Greek city-states to unite to bring an army against Persia and defeat them at the Battle of Plataes.

What would have been the result if the 300 had redeployed from Thermopylae?  Would the nascent western civilization forming in Greece have been snuffed out and the world plunged into tyranny for the next two and a half millennia?

What will happen if we redeploy from Iraq?  Will 200 years of freedom start to be snuffed out to be replaced with Taliban-like rule of the Islamofacists?

Probably not tomorrow.  But perhaps in your children's lifetimes.
   

Das Leben der Anderen

My movie tastes are, if anything, eclectic.  My Netflix queue will contain silly summer blockbusters and subtitled foreign films and small art house movies and television shows that weren't quite successful (right now I'm running through the five disks of the single season of Space: Above and Beyond) or some that were (still waiting on that tenth season of Frasier).

Last night I watched The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen).  It's a German film (subtitled) set in East Berlin in 1984-85 with a denouement after the wall fell.  The movie shows the banality of the evil of living under communism.  Even without showing a gulag or a summary execution, oily pervasive evil infuses the film.  A government minister wants an actress so he orders the secret police--the Stasi--to find something incriminating about her writer boyfriend.  This despite he's regularly raping her in the back of his Volvo staff car.  The same minister threatens a subordinate by saying "I'll put you against the wall."

People who think America is some sort of police state due to the Patriot Act and FISA need to see this movie set in a land where you cannot say, think, feel, or do what you want without worry that the State will take umbrage and you'll end up in a detention center (or worse).  I found myself wondering what I would do if what I said in this blog could land me in a gulag.

The Stasi officer assigned to the surveillance of the writer is a communist true believer and instructor at the Stasi school and a skilled interrogator.  The writer--also a true believer--has managed to carve out a happy and relatively free existence.  In listening to the lives of these others, the officer realizes that he is a jailer in the worlds largest jail trying to keep those whose minds are essentially free caged for the use of the State.  And he falls in love with the woman himself but a sort of platonic love of an admirer.  And this leads him to betray the State to protect her and the writer (he fails in half that task) even as ironically, the writer becomes disillusioned with the communist system.

This is an amazingly deep, complicated, and sad yet uplifting movie.  The writer and the Stasi agent finding redemption in the end.

I recommend this movie to anyone.  William F. Buckley in one of his last essays (he's on hiatus since the death of his wife, a haitus I hope he returns from) in National Review said:

Omnipresent in the film is the Stasi officer who is listening to it all, turning the device over to a coadjutor every eight hours, together with notes about the conversations he has overheard during his watch. And then, and then, there is a trickle of humanity, which quickly turns the drama into three parts, Stasi vs. German humankind vs. Stasi. The tension mounts to heart- stopping pitch and I felt the impulse to rush out into the street and drag passersby in to watch the story unfold.

The principal players are captivating, especially the main Stasi officer, who, without a change in aspect of his dour countenance, undergoes this convulsion of the soul, which permits the author life . . .

Get this DVD and watch it.  It'll change how you look at your freedoms.

Young Frankenstein: the Musical

After the stunning success of his Broadway musical "The Producers" (based on his 1968 movie of the same name), Mel Brooks is back on the boards with "Young Frankenstein."  Again, based on one of his better movies (perhaps his best; from 1974), "Young Frankenstein" (hereafter "YF") is playing it's debut performances in Seattle.  If the attendance at a Saturday matinee is any indication, it's playing to near or totally sold-out crowds in the historic Paramount Theater.

And for good reason: it's hilarious.  The biggest downfall for me is the songs (full disclosure: I am not a fan of musicals, especially movies but plays I'll cut some slack).  The music and lyrics were by Mr. Brooks.  To ask Mel to be an incredibly funny man (and he is) and a funny Andrew Lloyd Webber would be asking too much.  His songs (and this is true of "The Producers," too) tend to be trite and even a bit annoying.  I still have "Join the Family Business" stuck in my head where Frederick Frankenstein's ancestors (and the beautiful Inga) encourage him in a dream to build a monster.  What saved many on the songs in "The Producer" was that they were sweet, funny, or full of double entendres.  In YF, Mel left out the sweet.  But then again, building a monster is not really a sweet story.

I also have little patience for long song and dance numbers (except for the pretty dancers).  And speaking of pretty, laboratory assistant Inga is played by Sutton Foster with the lithe body of a dancer and a singing voice that matches her loveliness, was the treat of the afternoon.  Roger Bart plays Frederick Frankenstein like Dan Aykroyd doing Gene Wilder.  Megan Mullally (of "Will and Grace" fame) plays Frederick's frigid yet frisky fiancée Elizabeth with finesse.  Comparing her to the brilliant and incomparable Madeline Kahn would be unfair, but who says life is fair.  She doesn't compare to Ms. Kahn, yet comes achingly close as she wisely chose to take the character in her own direction.  I haven't watched much "Will and Grace" (maybe 30 minutes total) but she seems to play Elizabeth just as she played Karen Walker on the TV show.  At least she can sing if not up to Ms. Kahn's standards.  And Andrea Martin as Frau Blucher (cue horse whinny) is hilarious.  "He Vas My Boyfriend" is practically worth the price of admission itself.

If YF is a hit on Broadway (not the one on Capitol Hill in Seattle)  it will be on the performances of its stars, it's high production values (but the moon has got to stop bouncing) and the hilarity of its book.  The songs are--to me--just filler.

P.S.: I'm eternally grateful to my friend Mark for turning me on to Mel Brooks circa 1976.  So when's Spaceballs The Musical going to come out?

Sicko

Enough said?

More Moore (or Less)

Michael Moore, always keen for free publicity mixed with a little paranoid delusion, thinks the Justice Department is out to get him [links original]:

"I believe that the decision to conduct this investigation represents the latest example of the Bush Administration abusing the federal government for raw, crass, political purposes," Moore wrote in a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson posted on his website (www.michaelmoore.com).

"There are a number of specific facts that have led me to conclude that politics could very well be driving this Bush Administration investigation of me and my film."

Moore said he was surprised by the timing of the investigation, which comes two weeks before the premiere of "Sicko" at the Cannes Film Festival and one month before its US opening.

Oh, get over yourself.

So, what did Moore do?  He went to Cuba, probably illegally:

Moore is the subject of a probe by the US Treasury after he took a group of rescue workers in the September 11, 2001 attacks to Cuba for medical treatment during filming of "Sicko," possibly violating a 45-year-old US embargo that limits trade and travel to the country.

AP is reporting:

The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control notified Moore in a letter dated May 2 that it was conducting a civil investigation for possible violations of the U.S. trade embargo restricting travel to Cuba. A copy of the letter was obtained May 8 by the AP.

"This office has no record that a specific license was issued authorizing you to engage in travel-related transactions involving Cuba," wrote Dale Thompson, OFAC chief of general investigations and field operations, in the letter to Moore.

What Moore wants to do is claim that the Cuban health care system is better than America's.  He did this on his short-lived television show "TV Nation" having a "competition" between the U.S., Canada, and Cuba when it comes to health care.  It's not surprise that in Moore's show, Cuba came in first (Canada was second).  Back then Moore was still playing his "I'm just a guy from Flint" shtick with the baseball cap and the blue jeans and, gee, even I'm smart enough to see Cuba's system is better.

So he's still telling the same story over 10 years later.

Fred Thompson (yes, I do like Senator Thompson) tell the true story:

While this p.r. stunt has obviously been successful — here I am talking about it — Moore’s a piker compared to Fidel Castro and his regime. Moore just parrots the story they created — one of the most successful public-relations coups in history. This is the story of free, high quality Cuban health care.

The truth is that Cuban medical care has never recovered from Castro’s takeover — when the country’s health care ranked among the world’s best. He won the support of the Cuban people by promising to replace Batista’s dictatorship with free elections, and to end corruption. Once in power, though, he made himself dictator and instituted Soviet-style Communism. Cubans not only failed to regain their democratic rights, their economy plunged into centrally planned poverty.

As many as half of Cuba’s doctors fled almost immediately — and defections continue to this day. Castro won’t allow observers in to monitor his nation’s true state, but defectors tell us that many Cubans live with permanent malnutrition and long waits for even basic medical services. Many treatments we take for granted aren’t available at all — except to the Communist elite or foreigners with dollars.

For them, Castro keeps “show” clinics equipped with the best medicines and technologies available. It was almost certainly one of these that Moore went to, if the stories in the NY Post and the Daily News are true.

But Moore isn't interested in the truth.  He's interesting in pushing his Stalinist ideals while claiming to be an average Joe (albeit, with an Oscar and millions of dollars).  Thompson points out his hypocrisy:

The other thing that irks me about Moore and his cohort in Hollywood is their complete lack of sympathy for fellow artists persecuted for opposing the Castro regime. Pro-democracy activists are routinely threatened and imprisoned, but Castro remains a hero to many here. According to human rights organizations, these prisoners of conscience are often beaten and denied medical treatment, sanitation or even adequate nutrition.

If Moore wants a subject for a real documentary, I would suggest looking into the life of Cuban painter and award-winning documentarian Nicolás Guillén Landrián. He was denied the right to practice his art for using the Beatles’ song, “The Fool on the Hill,” as background music behind footage of Castro climbing a mountain. Later, he was given plenty of free Cuban health care when he was confined for years in a “mental institution” and given devastating, repeated electroshock “treatments.”

But Moore isn't interested.