Placing Yourself In the Wrong Company II

Gee, first Orrin Hatch compares John Roberts to Jesus, then Michael Bay says this:

"Everyone from Spielberg to Zemeckis to Kubrick — they've all had big flops," he said. "I was five for five. You know it's going to happen."

"It hurts," Bay added. "It's always the director's fault."

Spielberg, Zemeckis, Kubrick and Bay. Which of these things is not like the other? Which of these things just doesn't belong? Spielberg has run hot and cold in his career. It's sometimes hard to believe that the same man who made Schindler's List and Raiders of the Lost Ark also made Jurassic Park II and 1941. I'm less familiar with Zemeckis's failures than with his successes. I can say I vastly prefer Back to the Future to Forrest Gump, though both movies show a zest for their themes. Kubrick was one of the greatest film directors in movie history. Even his least interesting pictures have 1,000 times the appeal of Micahel Bay's best. (Come to think of it, I don't think I've seen a Kubrick movie that I've disliked.) What separates these three from Bay is not so much talent, though all three exceed by millions of times Mr. Bay's meager store of the substance, as it is a conception of film making as something other than a means of separating a few million popcorn-munchers from their money. The other three directors were surely interested in money--it's hard not to be in a business where production costs are so high--but they also wanted to produce something worthwhile, something that would be remembered when they were dead, something that both honored the great fictions of the past and compelled future generations of artists to respond.

If Mr. Bay saw himself this way, he would never claim that he was "five-for-five." He'd know what everyone else knows; he's a hack. He doesn't make movies. He makes 140 minute commericials for movies. Now that he's had his big failure he'll discover something else. There are a lot of hacks out there who can make junk, and they'll do it at half Bay's price. I hope, for Bay's sake, that he saved his money. He may very well need it.

I Once Again Read Nick Kristof So You Don't Have To

Logline: Isn't it sad that celebrity news overshadows genocide? Tone: simultaneously scolding and self-congratulatory. Chance of it making a difference: are you kidding?

"The Island" Is A Flop

Michael Bay can't defend his career with the "All my movies are successful" crapola. The Island took in $12 million last weekend, for a 4th place opening. (Charley and the Chocolate Factory, in its 2nd week, made $28 million over the same period.)

It's not schadenfreude because I am not ashamed of my glee. Bay's film will sink and die, and lose over $100 million in the process. The next time I fly to L.A., I might see him behind the Burger King counter at the terminal, trying to talk someone into buying an Island collectors cup.

Oh bliss! Oh bliss and heaven!

Overplaying Their Hand?

Orrin Hatch just described Bush's supreme court pick thusly:

"They're against any Republican. We knew that just no matter who it was -- it could be the greatest person in the world, and Roberts is, is that -- they would come out against him."

The greatest person in the world? The world, Orrin? I don't mean to tell you how to do your selling job, but shouldn't you at least stick to the realm of the remotely plausible? Oh, I forgot, you're a Republican. Never mind. Greatest person in the world. Whatever, dude.

Raiders re-sign Ricky Dudley

Ricky Dudley returns to the Raiders after a long period in the wilderness. I'm not sure what he adds, really. Teyo Johnson and Courtney Anderson have much greater upside. Maybe there's something on special teams they want him to do.

James Doohan Died

And another part of my past vanishes. I hear it'll get worse.

Review: The Killer Shrews

I remember shrews from my younger days. My cat used to bring them in the house. They'd wander around stupidly, passing up open doors and bumping into table legs. Incompetant little critters, they live to be cat food.

Thus there is something comical about the idea that the shrews have grown large, taken up a pack mentality, and beseiged a group of hard partying, chain-smoking scientists in Ray Kellogg's The Killer Shrews. Basically, James Best and his first mate (who, being black, is pegged from the beginning as a killer shrew buscuit) show up on an island populated by two incomprehensible Swedish scientists, a guy who sounds like he wandered in from the industrial film next door, and a hispanic man of uncertain profession. The scientist explains that he has picked a location for his experiments whose isloation and inaccessability to all forms of transit make it ideal for a grade-z monster thriller. These experiments transformed ordinary incompetant shrews into Siberian huskies who wear distressed carpets on their backs. They need to eat three times their body weight every day, and so have munched every living thing on the island except the scientists, who are now holed up in an adobe house with an industrial grade wood fence, twenty cartons of Lucky's, and three thousand cases of Jim Beam. (Instead of doing rodent research, they should have airlifted in some roulette wheels and hookers and called it Cubasphere II.)

So we watch these people smoke and drink while James Best puts the moves on an incomprehisible Swedish woman who is involved (on some unclear level) with the guy who played Festus on "Gunsmoke". Festus, in this story, drinks and smokes a lot, and combines two functions in one figure. He's the Jealous Boyfriend who hates the hero, and he's the Panicky Idiot who complicates things for everyone before he dies stupidly. The husky-shrews ultimately burrow into the house, killing the hispanic fellow of uncertain profession. (We know he's hispanic because, while he speaks better English than much of the cast most of the time, he still says "Senior" and "Si".) The shrews then kill the industrial film guy. (Apparently, in addition to turning into Siberian huskies under carpet, they also somehow became venemous, so that a single scratch from their teeth will kill any secondary character.) They fail however to get the two Swedes, or the hunky James Best, who build armor out of welded-together oil drums and duck walk to the ocean, where Best's boat waits for them. Oh, Festus does die as well, but in a scene so silly and arbitrary it's as if he said to himself, "I was fairly safe up on the roof, but now I think I'll run out into the middle of the shrew-ridden forest so that the movie won't have loose ends." If I cared about his character, I'd have felt cheated; but instead, I only wished his death had come earlier, and more slowly.

Gee, the way I wrote this, I made THE KILLER SHREWS sound like a tough sit. It wasn't. Get some friends together with some hard liquor, turn on this movie, and see if the characters can drink you under the table.

Sorry, Charlie

I hear from Majikthise that the creator of Charlie the Tuna died. What base lessons we teach when we die. When John Denver died the lesson was let the guy top off your damn fuel tanks when he offers. When JFK Jr. died the lesson was don't fly at night over the ocean if you're not instrument rated. The lesson here (and in the case of Bill Shatner's late wife as well I guess) is don't swim in backyard pools by yourself if you're old or drunk. Of course, you can't avoid death forever--though I, like Yossarian, plan to live forever if it kills me--but you should make it work to get you. The irony is that Charlie's creator would probably have told you yesterday that swimming a few laps every day was the key to his longevity.

So it goes.

Aside

Because I brought up "My Mother the Car" in the last post, I decided to look it up. IMDB gave me the following advice:

If you like this title, we also recommend...

"Mary Tyler Moore" (1970)

Actually, if you like "My Mother the Car", I recommend intensive psychotherapy combined with powerful mind-altering drugs, specifically, a beach-ball sized dose of Haloperidol. How did IMDB make that leap? My guess would have been that if you liked "My Mother the Car" you would also like to watch videos of a morbidly obese man who'd trained his cat to pick lint out of his belly-button.

Wait! Everybody freeze! I think I can pitch that to ABC. Don't think of stealing this from me! I own full rights, damn you!

About PBS

What I find touching about Joel Stein's call to end the PBS subsidy is his belief that a) market forces will produce better television, and that b) all the worthwhile shows will find homes on private networks. A) can be falsified by simply watching television. Market forces made "Baywatch" the #1 show in the world for years. "Baywatch" my friend. Forty-seven minutes of prime-time T&A. The current TV market is mostly dominated by clones. "Law and Order", "Law and Order Special Victims Unit", and "Law and Order: Criminal Intent". There are at least five thousand cities in which CSI is currently operating. Then you've got a wide variety of lame magazine shows--which are handy if it's November or May and you're jonesing to look at prostitutes. And this leaves out the frillions of reality shows that wind up on the tube every season, each slightly stupider than the last. If market forces have advanced us an inch since "My Mother the Car" slithered its way onto CBS, I've yet to see the proof. A tiny percentage of any television is worthy. I find it particularly useful when football season comes around. But I'd rather eat a bug than watch most of it, and market forces haven't changed that.

As for B) well, let's see..."The News Hour" and "Frontline" will end up on CNN or MSNBC? I don't think so, unless they can replace Jim Lehrer with Chris Matthews, who will gain another hour to shout questions at Howard Fineman and Peggy Noonan; and unless "Frontline" would be willing to bring its hard hitting investigative approach to the question of what makes Tom Hanks so wonderful:

"This man, whose face we're concealing so protect his identity, recently testified before a Philadelphia grand jury that Tom Hanks is a truly stupefyingly beautiful human being who would bring him soup when he was sick."

Maybe the "Discovery Channel" can buy up "Nova", and put its staff to work delvering the scientific goods on why Ronald Reagan is "The Greatest American" or explaining what it is that makes the "American Chopper" guys so fucking cranky. "Bravo" might buy "Masterpiece Theater", though they just as easily might replace it with their most recent abomination, "Being Bobby Brown".

The networks that Stein thinks will buy these admired pieces of PBS are notoriously fickle enterprises, given to changing their formats in ways that completely obliterate their original purposes. TLC was at one time The Learning Channel, showing documentaries on nature, science, and, during sweeps, sex. Now, they're The Lifestyle Channel, and they educate people mainly about how to inflict their horrible taste on their neighbors for $1000 or less. The Discovery Channel is spending an increasing amount of its energy on cop programs and their "American Chopper" series. "Mythbusters" is the only show on that network I find at all interesting. Starting tomorrow, any or all of these networks could decide to abandon educational programming entirely and switch to full contact female dwarf tosser mud wrestling.

It's true the PBS has put up fewer good shows in recent years. (I'm really sick of watching George Ray stuff his face.) Budget cuts and their status as a political football over the lsat ten years have taken their toll. Pledge breaks have increased in frequency and duration, and with them the regrettable appearances of Dr. Wayne Dyer. Still, PBS's audience is far larger than any of the cable networks Stein is talking about. In a contest between Lehrer and CNN, it's Lehrer in a blowout. It's an asset that can be improved and strengthened with the right management. Over the years PBS has created some enormous winners, and quite a few losers, but they never, never, and I mean never made "Being Bobby Brown." For this reason alone, they should live, and others should die.

Review: Friday the 13th

Yes, it's twenty-five years late, but I finally watched Friday the 13th. It was a hard sit. I usually don't watch movies on television because of the commercials. In this case, the commercials were something to look forward to.

Friday th 13th is kind of like a Hamlet where all the characters are replaced by Rosencrantz and Gildenstern. Everyone's sole purpose in the movie is to die messily. (Unlike Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, however, we are supposed to see these people either nude or near nude before they die. See, if Shakespeare had added that element, Hamlet could have finished behind The Empire Strikes Back at the box office in 1980, and then he really would have been a player, baby.)The most shocking thing about this movie is that it is a screaming bore. Each character's fate is a foregone conclusion, so most of the movie involves waiting...and waiting...and waiting for the poor little teenager to die. Even the climatic battle between Alice and Mrs. Voorhees is loaded with padding, largely because Alice keeps dropping weapons and passing up oppotunities to kill the miserable old bat when she has the chance. She manages to fumble away a baseball bat and a rifle, and she refuses to pick up Mrs. Voorhees's machete when the besweatered harridan loses consciousness and is, presumably, at Alice's mercy.

The way they leave room for the sequel in this movie is pathetic. The movie suggests that Jason Voorhees is "still out there", which radically shifts the movie's tone from a psycho-mother slasher picture to a more supernatural horror story in the final five minutes. If the real story was Jason Voorhees's return from the grave, what the hell was the rest of the story for? And why does he rise from the grave anyway? Did his mother have something to do with it, or did he just wake up or...oh, for fuck's sake, why am I bothering with these questions? You'd be better off looking at blank screen than watching this movie, although, as dark as the picture is, you'd be doing a lot of that if you did watch this moive.

Haw! Haw!

Oh, to be Nelson Muntz.

Bush falls off a bike. Remember all that crap about what an athlete he was supposed to be back in 2000? This is twice in two months, isn't it? When I was in high school I rode my bike to school four days out of five (sometimes on icy roads) and didn't manage to fall once. It's bad enough he's a vicious, lying, tyrannical sociopath. He's a clumsy vicious, lying, tyrannical sociopath.

Actually, if Bush and I were both nicer people, I'd express concern about his health. But since I really don't care what happens to the man--haw! haw!

In the Plus Column...

...He is the first man from Kennewick to ever take a college exam.

Publication. Sweet, sweet publication

Don't get excited. Steve Corkran of the Contra Costa Times just answered my question:

Q.

With the Philip Buchanon trade to Texas, who are the Raiders looking at to fill the role of Kick/Punt returner? Do either Fabian Washington or Stanford Routt have any experience in that area?
Jim S., Seattle, WA 7/01/05

A.

Jim, With Phillip Buchanon gone, the Raiders have several options on kick and punt returns. They will try both of the rookies you mentioned, Fabian Washington and Stanford Routt, along with Carlos Francis, Doug Gabriel, Justin Fargas and perhaps even Ronald Curry. Whoever they settle upon at punt returner can't do any worse than Buchanon fared last season, so look for an upgrade there. Francis, Gabriel and Fargas have done well on kick returns in the past and should assume that role this season. Take care. Sincerely, Steve.
Steve Corkran 7/05/05

I'd forgotten about Carlos Francis, the fastest guy in the 2004 NFL Draft. With Fargas, I always feel a twinge of worry about his ball carrying. I don't know if I'd want to see Ronald Curry returning kicks. He's too valuable in the slot. (Though Tim Brown used to do it, even later in his career.)

It looks like we won't have much to worry about in this area. Now about that linebacking corps...

Ten Favorite Sports Moments

Kevin Drum did his, and because my students stood me up this evening (how they explain all the penalty charges to their parents I don't know) here's my list of the ten greatest sports moments I've watched live:

10. George Foreman vs. Michael Moorer. (1994) Why do you have a George Foreman grill? This is why. George Foreman was behind on all the cards in the ninth round, but knew that all he needed was one clean shot. He got that clean shot when Moorer blundered into a solid right from Foreman that, well, it reversed his direction, then dropped him to the floor. Moorer was out, and as I recall, he stayed out for quite some time.

9. Jimmy Connors vs. Patrick McEnroe. 1991 U.S. Open (2nd or 3rd round). This was the defining match of an incredible run at the U.S. Open for Connors that ended against the King of Bland, Jim Courier. Connors played what had to be the most improbable match I've ever seen, including a sequence when he lobbed two or three overhead smashes in a row back at McEnroe from the wall behind the baseline. He went on to win the point.

8. Venus Williams vs. Lindsey Davenport. July 3rd, 2005. Wimbledon Finals. I'd been up all night revising a screenplay, when I remembered that the women's match would start at 6am. I thought it would run an hour, an hour-and-a-half at most, so I stayed up. It went on for another thrilling hour and twenty-five minutes as Venus kept coming back from what looked like certain death to survive tripe match point in the second, a tiebreaker, and a break point in the third, to finish Davenport 9-7 in the final set and take the All England Championship.

7. Chicago Bears vs. New England Patriots. Super Bowl XX. It wasn't much of a game to look at, but it was the crowning achievement of one of the greatest football teams ever assembled. They also whipped the Patriots, a team I've grown to detest. Whenever I see footage of Dent sacking Tony Eason, I pretend it's Tom Brady. Open the gates!

6. Kirk Gibson Homers: You've all seen it. It's a gorgeous play. Songs will be sung of it. Epics will be written. All of that.

5. Raiders vs. Broncos. Veterans Day, 2002. With the Raiders at 4-4 facing the 6-2 Broncos at Mile High, I feared the worst. When I left work, I turned on the radio and the announcer said that Jerry Rice had been tackled on the 7, but he didn't say which 7. I couldn't move until Gannon floated a pass to Rice in the end zone to put Oakland in the lead and answer my question. From there, or at least, from thereabouts, Gannon completed twenty passes in a row, (nearly beating Joe Montana's record) to rip Shanahan's Broncos 35-10. Another highlight worthy of framing: Rod Woodson's 96-yard interception return. This victory set the Raiders up for a run to the AFC Title. (Rumor has it there was another game after that, but I don't seem to recall it.)

4. 1984 NBA Finals. Celtics vs. Lakers. This was the first of three epic finals battles between Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. The Celtics ended up taking the series 4-3, but it was a war to the final buzzer. It think I was visiting my grandmother in Pacific Palisades that summer, and wherever I'd been all day, I always made sure I was back for the games to cheer on the Celtics with my dad.

3. Buster Douglas knocks out Mike Tyson, Feb 11th 1990. There was something about that night that told me it would be Tyson's last night as champion. Tyson never seemed able to cope with Douglas's jab, which rendered him incapable of landing his usual array of vicious inside punches. The accumlation of blows from Douglas closed Tyson's eye, and ultimately took him out. Tyson was never the same.

2. San Francisco 49ers vs. Cincinnati Bengals. Super Bowl XXIII. As much as I loved watching the 49ers dismantle the Broncos (and believe me I loved it), this was the greatest of them all. That final drive is deservedly legendary, and unlike a certain NFL quarterback who will remain Brady, Joe Montana didn't need the refs to grease the skids for him.

1. LA Raiders vs. the Patomac Drainage Basin Indigenous Persons. We whipped their asses. My favorite moment was Marcus Allen's amazing 71 yard run to the end zone in the third quarter. Not even the great Bo Jackson could quite match it. (He performed a similar move against the Bengals, ran 90 yards, but some safety brought him down at the five.)

I know. I stretched the definition of a moment quite a bit in some cases. (The 1984 Playoffs are a blur, and the NBA website doesn't have a page showing highlights. I think I can safely assume that Bird, Magic, Kareem, and McHale made some spectacular moves over the course of those games.)

Deep Impact

Tried to see Tempel 1 through my telescope, but Seattle's light pollution left me with little chance of distinguishing its fuzziness from simple poor seeing. (The atmosphere was not particularly stable tonight, at least from where I was viewing.) I did get an okay look at Jupiter and the four Galilean moons. I haven't heard if the probe hit yet.

Update: Yes it did.

Quote of the Day

"An autobiography is the most treacherous thing there is. It lets out every
secret its author is trying to keep; it lets the truth shine unobstructed
through every harmless little deception he tries to play; it pitilessly
exposes him as a tin hero worshipping himself as Big Metal every time he
tries to do the modest-unconsciousness act before the reader. This is
not guessing; I am speaking from autobiographical personal experience; I
was never able to refrain from mentioning, with a studied casualness that
could deceive none but the most incautious reader, that an ancestor of
mine was sent ambassador to Spain by Charles I., nor that in a remote
branch of my family there exists a claimant to an earldom, nor that an
uncle of mine used to own a dog that was descended from the dog that was
in the Ark; and at the same time I was never able to persuade myself to
call a gibbet by its right name when accounting for other ancestors of
mine, but always spoke of it as the 'platform'--puerilely intimating that
they were out lecturing when it happened."
--Mark Twain, "Christian Science"

Sorry about the formatting. I can't figure out what the trouble is. It shows up just fine in Preview. Hmmm.

O'Connor Is Out

And many of us want to get into the fight. Sadly, our win/loss record in battles of this sort is not promising. We can never seem to get together on a stategy to shut people down on ideological grounds. (Could someone please tell me what's the matter with Borking a nominee who, like Robert Bork, would hold democracy in contempt?) The only way we seem to be able to come close to shutting these guys down is if Bush nominates someone who treats his subordinates badly. I'll join the fight, but given the Democrats' political weakness in Congress and the determination of W. to do really awful things, you'll forgive me if I'm pessimistic from the start.