I've got the basics triggered to post for the next couple of days. See you later!
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Can't Talk -- Busy
Posted by
SamuraiFrog
at
3:05 PM
6
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Labels: Literary Life, On the Subject of Me
Politics Annoy the Shit Out of Me
Can I please stop hearing news stories about President Duh's butt cancer check? Because I'm already sick of having to hear about the president's potential butt cancer. And is there any reason why, in getting a routine check for a possible buttectomy, Chim-Chim needs to cede his presidential powers to Dick Cheney? I mean, can one branch of government (Executive) really transfer their powers to another branch (Cthulid)? I know that the 25th Amendment provides for the temporary ceding of powers the the vice president, but does that still apply now that Cheney considers his office to be above the president's? And, really, didn't George W. Bush, potential butt cancer victim, cede all of his powers to Cheney back in 2001, anyway?
Oh well. King George can do whatever he wants, right? I mean, aren't we still in a declared state of emergency? He can act as unconstitutionally or as constitutionally as he wants.
A couple of other brief political notes that don't have to do with the president's potential cancer of the asshole (and believe me, I sure don't hope that he gets a painful and lingering cancer in a place so uncomfortable, because that would just be uncharacteristically cruel of me).
India elected its first woman president, Pratibha Patil. Reuters is saying her supporters are characterizing this as "a boost for the rights of millions of downtrodden women." Congress leader Sonia Gandhi, daughter-in-law of Indira Gandhi, called it proof that India "respects women." How much does India respect women? Well, there is still violence related to dowries, that's certainly respectful. A woman is murdered, raped, or abused every three minutes in India. The Indian government has also been talking about creating a registry of all pregnancies in order to stop feticide; people in India prefer boys so much that 10 million infant girls have been killed by their own parents in the past 20 years. However, they're listing fetuses among the dead; this is really about preventing abortions not done for what the government calls "an acceptable and valid reason." Progressive country that respects women, ain't it? At least, that's what we'll tell the two-day old found alive and buried in a grave by her grandfather recently. I'm sure writing down the names of all the pregnant ladies in a country of 1.1 billion will really make a difference.
Also: Iraqi government going on a month-long vacation? Because, what, they've earned it? I can't wait to see how many people die because the government decided it needed a four week break from trying to make a new system work. Excellently done. You have the needs of your citizens about as firmly in hand as our government does for us.
At least we can't claim that we're not providing an example for them. Because they're doing what George W. Bush does during a national crisis--taking the summer off.
Posted by
SamuraiFrog
at
7:52 AM
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Labels: Politics
Friday, July 20, 2007
500 Faves
directed by Charles Chaplin; starring Charles Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Henry Bergman, Tiny Sandford

277. Mon Oncle (1958)
directed by Jacques Tati; starring Jacques Tati, Jean-Pierre Zola, Adrienne Servantie, Lucien Fregis

278. Mona Lisa (1986)
directed by Neil Jordan; starring Bob Hoskins, Cathy Tyson, Michael Caine, Robbie Coltrane

279. Monkey Business (1931)
directed by Norman Z. McLeod; starring The Marx Brothers, Thelma Todd, Rockliffe Fellowes, Harry Woods

280. Monsters, Inc. (2001) directed by Pete Doctor, David Silverman & Lee Unkrich; starring John Goodman, Billy Crystal, Steve Buscemi, Jennifer Tilly

281. Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983)
directed by Terry Jones; starring Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Jones, Eric Idle

282. Mother (1996)
directed by Albert Brooks; starring Albert Brooks, Debbie Reynolds, Rob Morrow, John C. McGinley

283. Mountains of the Moon (1990)
directed by Bob Rafelson; starring Patrick Bergin, Iain Glen, Fiona Shaw, Peter Vaughan

284. Mudhoney (1965)
directed by Russ Meyer; starring Hal Hopper, Rena Horton, Lorna Maitland, John Furlong

285. The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)
directed by Brian Henson; starring Michael Caine

286. The Muppet Movie (1977)
directed by James Frawley; starring Charles Durning, Austin Pendleton

287. The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984)
directed by Frank Oz

288. My Life Without Me (2003)
directed by Isabel Coixet; starring Sarah Polley, Amanda Plummer, Scott Speedman, Deborah Harry

289. My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
directed by Hayao Miyazaki; starring (English version) Dakota Fanning, Elle Fanning, Tim Daly, Pat Carroll

290. My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999)
directed by Isao Takahata; starring (English version) James Belushi, Molly Shannon, Tress MacNeille, Daryl Sabara

291. The Naked Kiss (1964)
directed by Samuel Fuller; starring Constance Tower, Anthony Eisley, Michael Dante, Virginia Grey

292. Nanook of the North (1922) directed by Robert J. Flaherty

293. National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978)
directed by John Landis; starring John Belushi, Tim Matheson, John Vernon, Karen Allen

294. National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983)
directed by Harold Ramis; starring Chevy Chase, Beverly D'Angelo, Randy Quaid, John Candy

295. Natural Born Killers (1994)
directed by Oliver Stone; starring Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis, Robert Downey Jr., Tom Sizemore

296. Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941)
directed by Edward F. Cline; starring W.C. Fields, Gloria Field, Leon Errol, Franklin Pangborn

297. The NeverEnding Story (1983)
directed by Wolfgang Petersen; starring Barrett Oliver, Noah Hathaway, Tami Stronach, Deep Roy

298. The New World (2005)
directed by Terrence Malick; starring Q'Orianka Kilcher, Colin Farrell, Christian Bale, Christopher Plummer

299. The Night of the Hunter (1955)
directed by Charles Laughton; starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish, James Gleason

300. The Night of the Iguana (1964)
directed by John Huston; starring Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, Sue Lyon

Posted by
SamuraiFrog
at
3:30 PM
7
comments
Labels: 500 Faves, Films, Useless Lists
Embarrassing My Mom Is the Best Present of All
My mom called on Tuesday night to say Happy Birthday. At one point, she suddenly asked: "So, did you get your birthday surprise, or is that later?"
ME: What?
MOM: Are you going to get your birthday surprise?
ME (genuinely confused): What are you talking about?
MOM: You know... your BIRTHDAY surprise?
(Long pause.)
ME: You mean, like, a blowjob?
MOM (shocked): I DON'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT!!!
Posted by
SamuraiFrog
at
3:25 PM
3
comments
Labels: On the Subject of Me
Let the Links Hit the Floor
Well, once again there's not going to be a Throwdown this week. I mean, here's the news: people like Transformers, Lindsay Lohan's doing Ecstasy while she's being monitored for alcohol, a bunch of famous chicks wore bikinis at the beach, Congress had a slumber party, the tenuous Iraqi government is taking the month of August off, and the seventh Harry Potter book comes out tonight. And that's pretty much it. Not much to work with, even for me, who goes off on a tangent about nothing. So, here are a bunch of links, and I'm probably taking the weekend off. Hey, I got to finish this Harry Potter book, after all!
First, let's do the Harry Potter links!
* The Last Visible Blog: Harry Potter Is a Literary Phenomenon
* No Smoking in the Skullcave: Wizarding Words Day One, Day Two, Day Three, Day Four, and Day Five
* Pointless Waste of Time: Harry Potter Book Disguises
* Cracked: 6 Questions the Last Harry Potter Book Had Better Fucking Answer
* Byzantium's Shores has an excellent suggestion for the final page.(It's not this one, though.)
* Ken Levine with a romantic comedy scenario and an opinion about Scott Baio's reality show.
* Lazy Eye Theatre on Michael Bay's oversensitivity.
* My New Plaid Pants with some hilarious quotes.
* Splotchy goes to see Spider-Man 3.
* MC comments on something that was bound to finally happen.
* I-Mockery lists ten great things about Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back.
* Nikki Stafford on why the Emmys suck and the nominees.
* The Onion AV Club on one of the worst movies ever made: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.I might be going to see Hairspray tonight. Dark Horizons gets me in the mood by interviewing my Mandy Pants.
* The Get Smart trailer made me laugh my ass off.
* Johnny Yen's son has a quip that made me chuckle.
* Entertainment Weekly lists 10 great CG characters.
* Time lists their 33 favorite Simpsons cameos.
* Vanity Fair lists theit top 10 Simpsons episodes, but number ten is a dirty, bald-faced lie.
* The Muppet Newsflash on the (sort of) return of Farscape.* Cracked: The 10 Worst Celebrity Bands
* Exquisitely Bored in Nacogdoches on a Beatles project I thought was underrated.
* Lady, That's My Skull says it all about the Sandman.
* retroCRUSH with the best supervillain costumes.
* Becca has some cute pics of Brittany Murphy and (I know I've said this so much it's lost all meaning) the sexiest pictures of Aria Giovanni ever.
* JA celebrates his 30th birthday with a neat movie post.* Splotchy rocks the language posts with a safeword, some interjections, and hypothetical quotes.
* Bubs has some awesomely disgusting insect stories.
* Chance has a great post about flags.
* MC misses some stuff from his younger years.
* Johnny Yen reminisces over 1968.
* Dr. Monkey Von Monkerstein looks at hypocrisy, history, violence, equality and justice.
Posted by
SamuraiFrog
at
1:21 PM
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comments
Labels: Occasional Links
Ron Charles and the Total Fucking Obviousness
It's been a decade now, and yet every time a new Harry Potter novel is released, there's one like this in the Washington Post, where Ron Charles makes what he seems to think is the astoundingly original and still-highly-relevant point that just because kids (and adults) are reading the Harry Potter novels, it doesn't mean that kids are actually reading more.
Um, duh, professor.
I suppose he has to justify his job as senior editor of the "Book World" section by writing something about the final novel in this bestselling series, and I guess when you write for the Washington Post it's bound to be something pretentious and hackneyed. Predictably enough, he starts by making sure that we, the reader, know that he (and his daughter, whom he praises for it) is far too smart to enjoy the Harry Potter books. He even resorts to an overwrought cliche as quickly as possible: "O, the shame of it: a 10-year-old girl and a book critic who had had enough of 'Harry Potter.' We were both a little sad, but also a little relieved. Although we'd had some good times at Hogwarts, deep down we weren't wild about Harry, and the freedom of finally confessing this secret to each other made us feel like co-conspirators."
Ah, precious. Secure in the knowledge that his readers have been reassured at his incredible brilliance in discerning popular fiction over Important Literature, he then derides adults for reading J.K. Rowling's books: "perfectly intelligent, mature people, poring over 'Harry Potter' with nary a child in sight. Waterstone's, a British book chain, predicts that the seventh and (supposedly) final volume, 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,' may be read by more adults than children. Rowling's U.K. publisher has even been releasing 'adult editions.' That has an alarmingly illicit sound to it, but don't worry. They're the same books dressed up with more sophisticated dust jackets -- Cap'n Crunch in a Gucci bag."
Wow, you're only the five thousandth person to point out that there have been adult editions of the Potter novels, although you are one of the few to miss the American adult editions that have been prevalent for the last seven years or so.
Charles goes on to slam Harry Potter readers by branding this "cultural infantilism," and then laments the continuing decline in the amount of readers. But immediately after, we get to what Charles really wants to write about: his personal problems and how he feels underappreciated as a social force.
"Whenever I confess to people who work for a living that I'm a book critic," he bitches, "they turn to each other and shake their heads, amazed that anything so effete should pass for a profession." See, this little invective isn't really about Harry Potter, but about a supposed prejudice against literary critics. Then he goes on to say that people who say they don't read still want to know what he thinks of Potter, and he responds: "Of course, it's not really a question anymore, is it? In the current state of Potter mania, it's an invitation to recite the loyalty oath. And you'd better answer correctly. Start carrying on like Moaning Myrtle about the repetitive plots, the static characters, the pedestrian prose, the wit-free tone, the derivative themes, and you'll wish you had your invisibility cloak handy." So, in a mere two paragraphs, he's illustrated that his job is underappreciated and that people who love Harry Potter are both a) incredibly dumb and b) somehow violently opposed to people who don't love Potter.
What Charles also goes on to illustrate is his own prejudice against anything as popular as J.K. Rowling's series of books. He even downplays it by pointing out NEA data which says there is "a dramatic and accelerating decline in the number of young people reading fiction. Despite their enthusiasm for books in grade school, by high school, most kids are not reading for pleasure at all." Seriously, National Endowment for the Arts, it's the same saw every year. Not that I don't think more kids should read--reading has, after all, been one of the great pleasures of my life since I was five and I read Charlotte's Web all by myself--but how many years in a row is the NEA going to characterize this decline as "sharp and accelerating"? If it were happening as quickly as they say, no kid would even know what a book is by this point.
Charles then criticizes what their parents read (Evanovich and Patterson are name-checked), and decides that the Harry Potter series means nothing in the scope of literature, but is merely a phenomenon of advertising and marketing: "event" publishing, basically. "Through no fault of Rowling's," he charges, "Potter mania nonetheless trains children and adults to expect the roar of the coliseum, a mass-media experience that no other novel can possibly provide."
He concedes that schools teaching the same dusty classics over and over is part of the problem, but isn't that interested in going into it. I think it's too easy, anyway. For every teacher whose intepretations of Lord of the Flies were really stupid or who taught Shakespeare like an exceptionally bored android, there were two who made Huckleberry Finn, The Plague, and Moby Dick come alive, who turned me on to Julian Barnes or Ovid, or who finally made me understand the whole point of The Merchant of Venice. There are effective and ineffective teachers just as there are interesting and obvious book critics.
But perhaps the most totally fucking obvious point he makes about the literary market is this: "Like the basilisk that terrorized students at Hogwarts in Book II, 'Harry Potter' and a few other much-hyped books devour everyone's attention, leaving most readers paralyzed in praise, apparently incapable of reading much else." He backs this up by pointing to an oddly useless and stunningly easy Stanford (!) study that concluded: "In 1994, over 70 percent of total fiction sales were accounted for by a mere five authors." What did the fifth dentist recommend?
That's the real uselessness of this entire diatribe. Charles gets hysterical over what he thinks is a cultural phenomenon but is actually the way of the world. Popular books have always outsold the ones that last. It's the same thing in movies, and there is always someone bitching about it. Yes, it sucks that more people would rather see Star Wars and Transformers and Adam Sandler movies than Brokeback Mountain or Good Night, and Good Luck or Grizzly Man. But you also have to accept that more people are interested in what they (rather lamely) call "just being entertained" than anything deeper. Hell, Mark Twain wrote an entire essay about how pedestrian James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking novels were and lamented their popularity, adding: "I may be mistaken, but it does seem to me that 'Deerslayer' is not a work of art in any sense; it does seem to me that it is destitute of every detail that goes to the making of a work of art; in truth, it seems to me that 'Deerslayer' is just simply a literary delirium tremens."
My point is, this is hardly a new game in American culture--or, really, Western culture. If it isn't J.K. Rowling that the snobs are bitching about, it's Danielle Steele or Anne Rice or Robert Jordan or someone else who writes popular novels. This is a world where Entertainment Weekly hires Stephen King to write a column, and King--who has quite the complex about being taken seriously by the literary establishment--kisses up to the snobs by dismantling Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, a book he in one breath professes to love...even though he "knows" he's too smart to overlook its flaws.
What King and Charles and those others begging to be taken seriously forget is that the true works of art last. Moby Dick, published in 1851, sold around 3000 copies in Herman Mellville's entire life, and it's the greatest book ever written in the English language. It was outsold in 1851 by another novel, a piece of populism which sold 3000 copies in less than a year. That was Uncle Tom's Cabin. Both are respected as literary classics now. See, that's the other side. Sometimes the works of popular fiction last, too. Sometimes they're later appreciated as real classics. Maybe Little Women, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, A Christmas Carol and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer weren't written to last, but they certainly have. Not only does art last; so does quality, whether it's popular or not. They never seem to remember that Shakespeare was a popular author, too. And Rowling's novels will live on, and one day they'll be taken as seriously as C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia or Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain or J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings--none of which exactly garnered a glowing critical reception when they were published, either.
But I like the Harry Potter novels now; not in a snobbish way or in an anti-snobbish way, not in an ironic or a postmodernist way, not with any reservations or any intellectual critiques. I don't need a critic--or in this case, a reviewer--to do my thinking for me and tell me I'm stupid for liking them. Are they perfect? Are they Art? I don't really care. I genuinely love them. I love being in the world of magic and wizards and dark lords and a boy trying to grow up in the most outlandish and genuinely dire set of circumstances. And that's the only criterion I have for liking a book: is it a joy to read? And when it comes to Harry Potter, the answer is most resoundingly yes.
Posted by
SamuraiFrog
at
9:37 AM
11
comments
Labels: Literary Life
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Michael Moore vs. Homophobes
They keep saying he's fat because they can't attack his research. I'm glad Michael Moore keeps making documentaries, one-sided or not. It's not like the other side is exactly being fair, either.
Anyway, Moore said to The Advocate that he's considering a documentary on the anti-gay Christian Right movement, saying: "I think it's a very ripe subject for someone like me to make a movie about. Simply because we are not there yet and it remains one of the last open wounds on our soul that we are not willing to fix yet."
"There is nowhere in the four Gospels where Jesus uses the word homosexual. The right wing has appropriated this guy ... and they have used him to attack gays and lesbians, when he never said a single word against people who are homosexual. Anyone who professes to be a Christian and does that is certainly not following the teachings of Jesus Christ."
Good for him. I can't wait to see it, and I can't wait to see the Christian Right twist and bend and hem and haw and shuck and jive and fumfuh and bluster about how their monstrous prejudice is justified.
Posted by
SamuraiFrog
at
5:46 PM
7
comments
Labels: Films, Social Concerns
500 Faves
directed by Richard Curtis; starring Hugh Grant, Alan Rickman, Emma Thompson, Bill Nighy

252. Lust for Life (1956)
directed by Vincente Minnelli; starring Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, James Donald, Pamela Brown

253. M*A*S*H (1970)
directed by Robert Altman; starring Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Sally Kellerman, Tom Skerrit

254. M. Hulot’s Holiday (1953)
directed by Jacques Tati; starring Jacques Tati, Nathalie Pascaud, Micheline Rolla, Valentine Camax

255. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)
directed by George Miller & George Ogilvie; starring Mel Gibson, Tina Turner, Bruce Spence, Adam Cockburn

256. Madadayo (1993)
directed by Akira Kurosawa; starring Tatsuo Matsumura, Kyoko Kagawa, Hisashi Igawa, Joji Tokoro

257. The Madness of King George (1994)
directed by Nicholas Hytner; starring Nigel Hawthorne, Ian Holm, Helen Mirren, Rupert Everett

258. The Magnificent Seven (1960)
directed by John Sturges; starring Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Eli Wallach, Charles Bronson

259. Mallrats (1995)
directed by Kevin Smith; starring Jason Lee, Shannen Doherty, Jeremy London, Claire Forlani

260. A Man for All Seasons (1966)
directed by Fred Zinneman; starring Paul Scofield, Wendy Hiller, Leo McKern, Robert Shaw

261. Man of a Thousand Faces (1957)
directed by Joseph Pevney; starring James Cagney, Dorothy Malone, Jane Greer, Marjorie Rambeau

262. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
directed by Alfred Hitchcock; starring James Stewart, Doris Day, Brenda De Banzie, Bernard Miles

263. The Man Who Would Be King (1975)
directed by John Huston; starring Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Saeed Jaffrey, Christopher Plummer

264. Manhattan (1979)
directed by Woody Allen; starring Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Mariel Hemingway, Meryl Streep

265. Manhunter (1986)
directed by Michael Mann; starring William Peterson, Brian Cox, Dennis Farina, Joan Allen

266. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977)
directed by John Lounsbery and Wolfgang Reitherman; starring Sterling Holloway, Paul Winchell, Sebastion Cabot, John Fiedler

267. El Mariachi (1993)
directed by Robert Rodriguez; starring Carlos Gallardo, Consuelo Gomez, Jaime de Hoyos, Peter Marquardt

268. Mars Attacks! (1996)
directed by Tim Burton; starring Jack Nicholson, Glenn Close, Annette Bening, Sarah Jessica Parker

269. The Mask of Zorro (1998)
directed by Martin Campbell; starring Antonio Banderas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Anthony Hopkins, Stuart Wilson

270. Match Point (2005)
directed by Woody Allen; starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Scarlett Johansson, Emily Mortimer, Matthew Goode

271. Microcosmos (1996)
directed by Claude Nuridsany & Marie Pérennou

272. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1968)
directed by Peter Hall; starring Paul Rogers, Ian Richardson, Judi Dench, Ian Holm

273. Miracle on 34th Street (1947)
directed by George Seaton; starring Maureen O'Hara, John Payne, Edmund Gwenn, Natalie Wood

274. Mister Roberts (1955)
directed by John Ford & Mervyn LeRoy; starring Henry Fonda, James Cagney, William Powell, Jack Lemmon

275. Modern Inventions (1937)
directed by Jack King

Posted by
SamuraiFrog
at
12:20 PM
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comments
Labels: 500 Faves, Films, Useless Lists