The following actors must stop making movies immediately or face heavy fines levied by the MovieGoing Authorities:
Harrison Ford
Robert DeNiro
John Travolta
Mel Gibson
Jim Carey
Anthony Hopkins
They are, as a rule, talented. But long ago they became caricatures and hacks, and now must be stopped before they waste any further precious movie-making resources.
Is there any reason in the world why we should have to look at Ford's face again as he plays very tiresomely the Serious Adult in the room--avenging a threat to his or someone else's family?
Is there any reason why we should have to endure DeNiro mugging emptily in a movie he neither cares about nor adds anything to but the presence of his Name?
Can we just pretend Travolta's career consists of the several good movies he made (Saturday Night Fever; Pulp Fiction; Urban Cowboy) and "Welcome Back, Cotter"--and leave it at that?
Mel Gibson is a force that must be stopped--he has rarely played anything but a dark avenger adding nothing at all to the world but anger and violence and unhealthy vengeance. Did I mention vengeance?
Jim Carey was good on a half-hour TV comedy-variety show years ago that featured the Wayans brothers. After that, he had Dumb and Dumber. And then an undifferentiated string of movies, some animated, some not, in which he was grossly scatological and eminently not funny (and the overrated Truman Show). Pull the plug. Kill the Mask.
Anthony Hopkins: you died as an actor after playing Hannibal Lecter. You ate your career with Fava beans. Please retire to your English manor.
Once these abovementioned usurpers have been banished from the movie set, perhaps some younger, more-deserving, interesting actors can take their place in front of the camera; and our precious moviemaking resources can be utilized in the creation of valuable entertainment product instead of more rounds of depressing dreck destined rapidly for the bottom rack in the DVD section of BestBuy.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Avatar in Massachusettes
Yes, the name of the state is misspelled.
And here is a quote from science fiction editor Annalee Newitz (io9dotcom) via an article in the NYT:
"In movies like “Avatar,” Ms. Newitz wrote, “humans are the cause of alien oppression and distress,” until a white man “switches sides at the last minute, assimilating into the alien culture and becoming its savior.”
Whatever else viewers might say about Avatar--that it is anti-imperialist, pro-animist, anti-monotheism and all the rest--the fact is as Newitz implies: it's a white-guilt/redemption classic. Personally I found this theme rather obvious and that the obviousness of it detracted from the overall awe one could not help feeling for its complex visual beauty.
And now a perhaps tenuous but not, I think, altogether inappropriate segue to the Great Democractic Debacle in the Bay State where the now-forever-ignominious Ms. Coakley could not withstand the former nude male model's White Manly Pickup Truck onslaught in an election that could spindle National Health by allowing a Teabagger to take the place of the Great Healthcare Lion who recently and most ironically passed on just before he might vote on the Great Cause of his long tenure in that August Body.
In short, is it really possible that there is now a Palinesque male Junior Senator in the senate seat formerly held by Ted Kennedy? Wake up, ye thoughtful losers, for it has come to this. And many now say major health care reform, long and idiotically allowed to be held hostage by the GOP while an ineffectual near-supermajority of Democrats could not seem to do what any Republican Majority would have done (smash through whatever they wanted with 51 senate votes), may be in serious peril. Speaker Pelosi, facing us with an ever-less-believable rictus, says not to worry. However, if I am a fan of major health care reform, I am worried. And of course worried about the newly minted good fortune of the Grand Old Teabaggers--in "Massachusettes", where once a band of outraged taxpayers threw tea in the water dressed as "Indians" to protest levies of the Crown.
Let us now examine the manner in which the magnificently inept Coakley campaign misspelled the name of its own state in an ad during the campaign. And then let us think about the white-male-savior fantasy at the heart of What's-His-Name's unexpected victory.
The Hellenistic world, and especially the U.S.A. which is populated by all the peoples of the planet but governed by laws descendant from the Greek, has often been a theater of battle between pantheism and monotheism (to wit: Salem; slaughter of animist Native Americans; forced-Christianization of chained and shackled Africans). Monotheism has in this country been not only ascendant but unforgiving until quite recently (the 1960s), when all manner of thought not including a White Male Leader fairly exploded upon the general consciousness and wrecked the cut-grass and steak-for-dinner oppressiveness of the White Male Power Paradise.
It has gone poorly for the Traditional White Male ever since. Gone missing is his assumed throne at the pinnacle of creation as the landscape is re-shaped by powerful women, gay men and educated, powerful men of color . And now with an Articulate (please make careful note of the quote marks) "Negro" in the White House, the fortunes of the White Male may have come to seem almost permanently eclipsed.
But this White Male Monotheist is a fighting man if nothing else. His Templars took Jerusalem from the Saracens once, and today in America his Teabaggers are determined to take Washington from the Freaks and Geeks if it means the very destruction of the nation itself.
And here, in the cross-hairs, is poor Martha Coakley, unassuming Generic Female Candidate in what Democrats foolishly thought was a race they owned. This was the bluest of blue states after all--and this election was for the rightful Kennedy Seat! The trusty blue Commonwealth, it seemed to Dems, would elect a ham sandwich to that seat if the Dems told them to, would they not?
Not.
What has happened was this:
Martha early established her credentials as a nitwit and worse (by Teabagger lights), a female nitwit, by incorrectly feminizing the name of the state: Massachusettes (with that effete little extra "e" as if spelling "crepe suzettes"). Then she proceeded to assume, oddly like Hillary did not long ago, that the race was hers, and that there was no real need to compete.
Now here came the White Male Savior. And the guilt-ridden voters of Massachusetts, having allowed their state to help stain the purity of White Male Domination by helping elect a "different type" of man to the Presidency, saw their chance to "switch sides" and "save" themselves from a fate unendurable--that being a world ruled by laws signed by that fateful "Other": that guy with the near-unendurable name, Barack Hussein Obama.
And in his pickup truck he rode, Mr. Male Nude Model, and he was their Avatar, and they lived through him as he crunched and punched his way through the cobwebs of misspelling and ineptitude characterized by the inept and vague and miserable Coakley, and he won a Great Victory for the White Male and probably Monotheism by somehow convincing the N'avi of Massachusetts that he was one of them.
And that is how the Avatar came to Massachusettes.
And here is a quote from science fiction editor Annalee Newitz (io9dotcom) via an article in the NYT:
"In movies like “Avatar,” Ms. Newitz wrote, “humans are the cause of alien oppression and distress,” until a white man “switches sides at the last minute, assimilating into the alien culture and becoming its savior.”
Whatever else viewers might say about Avatar--that it is anti-imperialist, pro-animist, anti-monotheism and all the rest--the fact is as Newitz implies: it's a white-guilt/redemption classic. Personally I found this theme rather obvious and that the obviousness of it detracted from the overall awe one could not help feeling for its complex visual beauty.
And now a perhaps tenuous but not, I think, altogether inappropriate segue to the Great Democractic Debacle in the Bay State where the now-forever-ignominious Ms. Coakley could not withstand the former nude male model's White Manly Pickup Truck onslaught in an election that could spindle National Health by allowing a Teabagger to take the place of the Great Healthcare Lion who recently and most ironically passed on just before he might vote on the Great Cause of his long tenure in that August Body.
In short, is it really possible that there is now a Palinesque male Junior Senator in the senate seat formerly held by Ted Kennedy? Wake up, ye thoughtful losers, for it has come to this. And many now say major health care reform, long and idiotically allowed to be held hostage by the GOP while an ineffectual near-supermajority of Democrats could not seem to do what any Republican Majority would have done (smash through whatever they wanted with 51 senate votes), may be in serious peril. Speaker Pelosi, facing us with an ever-less-believable rictus, says not to worry. However, if I am a fan of major health care reform, I am worried. And of course worried about the newly minted good fortune of the Grand Old Teabaggers--in "Massachusettes", where once a band of outraged taxpayers threw tea in the water dressed as "Indians" to protest levies of the Crown.
Let us now examine the manner in which the magnificently inept Coakley campaign misspelled the name of its own state in an ad during the campaign. And then let us think about the white-male-savior fantasy at the heart of What's-His-Name's unexpected victory.
The Hellenistic world, and especially the U.S.A. which is populated by all the peoples of the planet but governed by laws descendant from the Greek, has often been a theater of battle between pantheism and monotheism (to wit: Salem; slaughter of animist Native Americans; forced-Christianization of chained and shackled Africans). Monotheism has in this country been not only ascendant but unforgiving until quite recently (the 1960s), when all manner of thought not including a White Male Leader fairly exploded upon the general consciousness and wrecked the cut-grass and steak-for-dinner oppressiveness of the White Male Power Paradise.
It has gone poorly for the Traditional White Male ever since. Gone missing is his assumed throne at the pinnacle of creation as the landscape is re-shaped by powerful women, gay men and educated, powerful men of color . And now with an Articulate (please make careful note of the quote marks) "Negro" in the White House, the fortunes of the White Male may have come to seem almost permanently eclipsed.
But this White Male Monotheist is a fighting man if nothing else. His Templars took Jerusalem from the Saracens once, and today in America his Teabaggers are determined to take Washington from the Freaks and Geeks if it means the very destruction of the nation itself.
And here, in the cross-hairs, is poor Martha Coakley, unassuming Generic Female Candidate in what Democrats foolishly thought was a race they owned. This was the bluest of blue states after all--and this election was for the rightful Kennedy Seat! The trusty blue Commonwealth, it seemed to Dems, would elect a ham sandwich to that seat if the Dems told them to, would they not?
Not.
What has happened was this:
Martha early established her credentials as a nitwit and worse (by Teabagger lights), a female nitwit, by incorrectly feminizing the name of the state: Massachusettes (with that effete little extra "e" as if spelling "crepe suzettes"). Then she proceeded to assume, oddly like Hillary did not long ago, that the race was hers, and that there was no real need to compete.
Now here came the White Male Savior. And the guilt-ridden voters of Massachusetts, having allowed their state to help stain the purity of White Male Domination by helping elect a "different type" of man to the Presidency, saw their chance to "switch sides" and "save" themselves from a fate unendurable--that being a world ruled by laws signed by that fateful "Other": that guy with the near-unendurable name, Barack Hussein Obama.
And in his pickup truck he rode, Mr. Male Nude Model, and he was their Avatar, and they lived through him as he crunched and punched his way through the cobwebs of misspelling and ineptitude characterized by the inept and vague and miserable Coakley, and he won a Great Victory for the White Male and probably Monotheism by somehow convincing the N'avi of Massachusetts that he was one of them.
And that is how the Avatar came to Massachusettes.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
http://www.clintonfoundation.org/haitiearthquake/
In the past few days, Bubba Clinton has been reported to to have said some rather unsavory things about the Hawaiian Who Would Be President to the late Lion of the Senate, but except for those who have eyes only for their own belly-buttons, none of that matters now.
The title of this post tells it all. Or you can text HAITI to 20222 for a quick $10 donation.
Go there and donate, unless you want to tell your grandchildren you did absolutely nothing for the victims of probably the worst disaster in this hemisphere in the past fifty years.
This one blows away the tsunami. It may not be as photo-tragic or epochal politically as the attacks on Lower Manhattan, and it may not be as evil as Rwandan genocide, Darfur or any number of atrocious acts committed by people against other people.
But this one has devastation on a scale almost unimaginable, in a land of poverty almost beyond belief. It is the near-wholesale destruction of a national capital populated by upwards of 2 million. It is the collapse of the National Palace. It is the falling-in of the roof of the National Cathedral. It is street after street, mile after mile, of flattened houses and buildings that had poorly been constructed and that crumbled each to dust during the mad shaking and aftershocks of a huge 7.0 temblor--the worst in that nation in 200 years (more or less since its liberation from the great and wonderful France)--and trapping within untold thousands of hapless innocents. It is the instant homelessness and heartbreak of a multitude.
A writer at the Daily Beast says that France was actually collecting REPARATIONS from Haiti until 1947, and that it ought to pay back every cent of that 22 billion in "reparations" right now, cash on the barrelhead.
Indeed.
For now, please go to Bubba's place and loosen up your wallet for Haiti. I know I am.
The title of this post tells it all. Or you can text HAITI to 20222 for a quick $10 donation.
Go there and donate, unless you want to tell your grandchildren you did absolutely nothing for the victims of probably the worst disaster in this hemisphere in the past fifty years.
This one blows away the tsunami. It may not be as photo-tragic or epochal politically as the attacks on Lower Manhattan, and it may not be as evil as Rwandan genocide, Darfur or any number of atrocious acts committed by people against other people.
But this one has devastation on a scale almost unimaginable, in a land of poverty almost beyond belief. It is the near-wholesale destruction of a national capital populated by upwards of 2 million. It is the collapse of the National Palace. It is the falling-in of the roof of the National Cathedral. It is street after street, mile after mile, of flattened houses and buildings that had poorly been constructed and that crumbled each to dust during the mad shaking and aftershocks of a huge 7.0 temblor--the worst in that nation in 200 years (more or less since its liberation from the great and wonderful France)--and trapping within untold thousands of hapless innocents. It is the instant homelessness and heartbreak of a multitude.
A writer at the Daily Beast says that France was actually collecting REPARATIONS from Haiti until 1947, and that it ought to pay back every cent of that 22 billion in "reparations" right now, cash on the barrelhead.
Indeed.
For now, please go to Bubba's place and loosen up your wallet for Haiti. I know I am.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Units under Stress--and Sun
Over a lengthy Holiday Season holiday, I found myself relaxing under a pleasant warm sun, in sight of the very pool where John, Paul, George and Ringo splashed for the cameras back when Kennedy had just been shot but the world was going to be all right anyway mostly because of those very moptops.
The hotel is a large, old ratpack haunt where the likes of Ed Sullivan and Jackie Gleason gave shows in the vast ballroom; where The Voice and The Drinker stayed; and that now has been rediscovered by Europeans (and me) as a somewhat offbeat, fairly-well restored three-star that drips Moderne on a relatively unfashionable stretch of Collins Avenue well to the north of the iniquity and madness of Ocean Drive. At the entrance, shiny new cars are lined up for valet parking; across the street are some rather humble but satisfying Brazilian-themed restaurants and markets. Within blocks are a bagel place with a straight-outta-Flatbush owner, an American bar and grille, a Chinese place that seems to have been ported in from somewhere along Queens Boulevard and a full-blown Sikh-owned headshop/newsstand/notary public that rivals anything in the East Village. Add winter warmth and you can see why I flat loved this neighborhood.
However, as is generally known, South Florida is also one of the two epicenters of egregious overbuilding of condos and houses (the other being Las Vegas). Noticeable even at the vaunted Beach are towers that stand seemingly rather empty and swanky-looking developments that seem in no hurry to be completed. The prices have been keenly pared on all of them and I have it on good authority that the bottom has not yet been reached.
According to my knowledgeable source, whose interaction with HUD and the effort to keep wayward homes from completely going to pot makes him privy to a wealth of information about the market, there are over a hundred thousand units in Dade County alone that are under stress and heading for foreclosure within the next eighteen months. Word is, there is no way that amount of property can be absorbed into the market--meaning that continuing price slippage is inevitable.
The tourist areas are still crowded--and in much better shape now than, say ten or fifteen years ago when Miami Beach was only a ghost of its past and a dream of its future--but there is no shortage of soaped-over storefront windows and bare patches here and there along the beachy highways.
Eventually a home in the oceanside land of perpetual warmth may be in order--but apparently more bargains are on the way. And let's all offer our kind considerations to those who irrationally believed that water plus yearlong sun plus four walls and a roof equaled ever-escalating home-value; then, after we kindly consider their real-estate foolishness, wait until their properties drop to the lowest point we can believe in and then buy them.
The hotel is a large, old ratpack haunt where the likes of Ed Sullivan and Jackie Gleason gave shows in the vast ballroom; where The Voice and The Drinker stayed; and that now has been rediscovered by Europeans (and me) as a somewhat offbeat, fairly-well restored three-star that drips Moderne on a relatively unfashionable stretch of Collins Avenue well to the north of the iniquity and madness of Ocean Drive. At the entrance, shiny new cars are lined up for valet parking; across the street are some rather humble but satisfying Brazilian-themed restaurants and markets. Within blocks are a bagel place with a straight-outta-Flatbush owner, an American bar and grille, a Chinese place that seems to have been ported in from somewhere along Queens Boulevard and a full-blown Sikh-owned headshop/newsstand/notary public that rivals anything in the East Village. Add winter warmth and you can see why I flat loved this neighborhood.
However, as is generally known, South Florida is also one of the two epicenters of egregious overbuilding of condos and houses (the other being Las Vegas). Noticeable even at the vaunted Beach are towers that stand seemingly rather empty and swanky-looking developments that seem in no hurry to be completed. The prices have been keenly pared on all of them and I have it on good authority that the bottom has not yet been reached.
According to my knowledgeable source, whose interaction with HUD and the effort to keep wayward homes from completely going to pot makes him privy to a wealth of information about the market, there are over a hundred thousand units in Dade County alone that are under stress and heading for foreclosure within the next eighteen months. Word is, there is no way that amount of property can be absorbed into the market--meaning that continuing price slippage is inevitable.
The tourist areas are still crowded--and in much better shape now than, say ten or fifteen years ago when Miami Beach was only a ghost of its past and a dream of its future--but there is no shortage of soaped-over storefront windows and bare patches here and there along the beachy highways.
Eventually a home in the oceanside land of perpetual warmth may be in order--but apparently more bargains are on the way. And let's all offer our kind considerations to those who irrationally believed that water plus yearlong sun plus four walls and a roof equaled ever-escalating home-value; then, after we kindly consider their real-estate foolishness, wait until their properties drop to the lowest point we can believe in and then buy them.
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