ClownCarBlog.com

test post ..

Just moved over to MT3.2 ... there appear to be some comment issues with any new comments automatically needing approval before being posted. Still investigating that one.

PS ... email accounts, I'm in the process of getting those set back up, but I'll have to do all the testing and whatnot after I get some sleep. Priorities for ya.

Hey, Maintenance Man

Maybe it's my ISP but I can't get reply windows to take text from my end. These newly added posts appear to always work, though. The reply windows claim 404 not founds and such, like

"...can’t open the page “http://www.clowncarblog.com/mt-comments.cgi”. The error was: “lost network connection” (NSURLErrorDomain:-1005)..."

That was from the current Apple browser; Ubuntu, XP and such give similar gripes (feel free to delete this post when needed).

FROM THE DESK OF THRILLHOUSE: Anyone else running into this? Seems like I once saw this happen and wrote it off as one of those server hiccups. Obviously, I tested it below and it works. So I'm not entirely sure what the case is with regard to this issue. In any event, I'm moving the site over to a new webhost over the weekend, complete with a nice upgrade to MovableType 3.2. I've used the latest release on a few blogs and it's a vast improvement. I might have to do some tweaking on the template, maybe not. But if you see anything odd with the site over the weekened, then .... um ... I guess you'll know things are back to what passes for normal here at the Clown Car.

Audio Test

To Heck with Sophie Scholl...

This is the must-see movie: Interkosmos

The East Germans started in the 1970's, with their allies, on an ambitious, secret project to colonise the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. You didn't know that, did you? Finn reveals all: with beautiful archive material, swinging musical numbers in retro-socialist style, beautiful miniature sets, guinea pigs and a dramatic plot theory.

How to win the war in Iraq... MERCENARIES!!

(image courtesy of Paul O'Neal)

Sophie Scholl: The Movie

Seriously, Ralphie, why haven't you dragged us all to see this movie yet?

Updated Movie List for next Uberthon Military Maneuversz

Zardoz (Sean Connery, Charlotte Rampling 1974)
The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-up Zombies (Ray Dennis Steckler 1964)
When Worlds Collide (Peter Hansen, Barbara Rush 1951) and - they're remaking this one!?
Head (The Monkees, Frank Zappa, Jack Nicholson 1968)

OK, now I'm really offended.

WTF

Worst ad copy I've read in years.

Explain this one...

Umm...

From A Detective Novel Yet To Be Written

"She was so intense that she gave me Vietnam flashbacks, which was unusual since I never served in Vietnam."

"The street glistened like a river of oil, syrup, blood and the noxious bodily fluids of some beast of the subconscious, angrily roused from a favorite Ren & Stimpy episode."

"There was a sound like a bowl of roaches and lighter fluid, roasting away on some back porch on a side street in Hell."

"The pain bellowed silently, as if an overdue tax form had been bestowed with intelligence and a bad attitude, then had grabbed a syringe full of Thunderbird and gone to town on him from behind."

Thank You for Smoking

I had enthusiatic hopes for this movie, loving anything cynical as I do, but this is really just a shallow examination of callous and thinly-drawn people. I want inside-baseball movies on big business and scoundrels to be penetrating, biting, indicting. The blacker, the better - and commitment is a must. You won't find any of that here.

The story of Nick Naylor's lobbying on behalf of big tobacco ought to provide an opportunity to revel in contradictions, to harken back to the halcyon days of a president who taught us just how much (sadly) we admire obfuscation - when it's done right. One predicted side-effect of 9/11 was the death of irony. That was obviously wrong, but someone ought to clue these filmmakers in because they tread way too lightly here.

Nick and his fellow MoDs (Merchants of Death) represent three ostensibly contemptible industries: Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Unfortunately, the film doesn't take any chances and all three are dunces. Daring would have been playing any one of these guys as effective. For all Nick talks about himself as a success, it never comes through in this film. And for his cohorts, less so. It almost seems as if these jokers are employed by the industries as some sort of inside joke: which can hire the worst lobbyist and still survive or even thrive despite him, thus revealing how beholden we are to our vices. That right there would have made for darker, more satisfying humor.

Nick's relationship with .. Holly, was it? (I don't remember, and don't care to look it up) comes off like a cheap variation of Dangerous Liaisons. No, wait... that would be Cruel Intentions. And frankly, the dynamic between these two leads is about as riveting as anything Ryan Philippe did. That is not a compliment. There's no sophisticated understanding between consenting adults about their sexual escapades. They look like high school seniors who are playing at it. When H tells Nick she wants to fuck him while he's on TV, it comes off as the sad dream of teeny-bopper crushing on her idol. If this were a more sophisticated film, she wouldn't have had to actually say anything. She would have climbed on top of him while watching him on TV and we'd have known exactly what was happening.

(Sidebar: any sex scene filmed in a room other than the bedroom, with the man standing up and the chick hanging from something and straddling him vigorously is meant to convey that THESE TWO PEOPLE DO NOT LOVE EACH OTHER. Because people who love don't have dirty sex like that! And married people wouldn't dare!)

You can also spot from a mile away that she will betray him. Because there's never once a moment where you think they connect anyway. If she indicated even a perverse appreciation for his slickness, it might begin to make sense. That's supposed to be OUR job, I gather, but it's a fool's errand.

Every time Nick tries to explain to his son why debate is such a magnificent thing, and how one can never lose, I found myself thinking that this arrested form of development is the real hangover of the 1990s: an ardent desire to stand for nothing... and manage to be admired for it. I love a good debate as much as the next guy, but I value more the release of new perspectives, and impassioned defense of something that is actually believed. I'm not saying the characters necessarily have to believe in something, but the film has to commit to an idea. This doesn't, and that's why there's no sting here. Creating a morally questionable but seductive character only works if you're not afraid to actually commit to the darkness of that character.

A perfect example of this kind of insincerity is that no one in this movie smokes on screen. Not that I remember, anyway... and if anyone did, shouldn't I remember it? This is a chicken-shit copout. Because we know that Nick DOES smoke, the director's refusal to show that is not really the awesome irony he intends. What we end up with comforms so much to our politically-correct expectation of non-smoking actors in films that the irony is upended. This is why the average French film should be considered more subversive.

The end is especially weak. Anyone who's watched C-Span knows that no matter how glib and articulate one may be, you are never going to "serve it up" to a senator in a hearing like that. Their power is quite literally overwhelming and you'd never pull it off. They rarely get flustered because it's their house, their rules, and they hold all the cards. The scene has the same fantastic quality of that oh-so-perfect comeback, blistering in its impact... but thought up a day late. With senators in a hearing, it's always a day late and you never have that moment.

I can't find any more ways to say this movie is extremely shallow and a failure. And I don't want to hear "it's supposed to be shallow... don't you get it?" because that's NOT what this is supposed to be. Satire requires poking holes in all our delusional bubbles, not taking care to ferry them unharmed to and fro. Nothing here is challenging. This movie (and likely the book) come off like a jaded college freshman's attempt to provide biting commentary on an industry that all his political literature tells him is hypocrital, but for which he has never worked - if he's worked at all. The best satire usually comes from an artist who has emerged from his target wounded, angry, and armed to the teeth. I sense that Chris Buckley just thought he'd toss this off and everyone would be blown away by his insights. If only there were any.

United 93

I won't write an entire review of this film, but I do want to take the time to address what I consider to be a very faulty article on it, Fisk-atorially:

Eschewing overt political statements, United 93 takes a broadly experienced national tragedy and makes it intensely personal.

Actually, no it doesn't. It's not particularly personal. There's not a moment in there that I think can be highlighted as a deliberate attempt by the filmmaker to bring us closer to any one subject or person. So much has been made about his dropping little bits of everyday conversation to humanize the victims that people seem to miss that's ALL that's there. Hearing the guy next to me in the airport on his cell phone does nothing to endear him to me. Fail.

But I wonder if there might be something else at work, a frustration that many left-leaning critics rarely face: how to deal with a well-made film that is also deeply conservative in its values.

There's nothing "deeply conservative" about this movie. But in fact, he's essentially contradicticting his previously-stated claim that "United 93 is a stirring memorial instead of a political diatribe."

But for once, there can be no complaints about diversity, about male dominance, about 'unbalanced' portrayals of foreign terrorists or any of the left’s other pet causes, because what the film shows is exactly what happened. (emphasis in the original)

Really? Wow, I'd thought all the news stories confirmed every passenger aboard died. Didn't know you found your way out of the plane just before it hit the ground. Congratulations! It's bad enough this guy is bold enough to assert this, but to emphasize it in such a smarmy way really takes the cake. What an unbelievable prick.

From the passengers who stormed the cockpit to the air traffic controllers harangued by unimaginable chaos, it is a real-life reminder of how ordinary Americans can become heroes.

Here's where I drift dangerously close to Bill Maher territory, but... full steam ahead: I'm not entirely certain what criteria are used to establish that these passengers are heroes. Imagine, for example, that the terrorists had actually intended to drive the plane into the ground.. or a mountain... or the sea. Once the passengers know the flight is a suicide mission, the destination itself becomes rather irrelevant. Does anyone beleive the passengers would have sat back and let them fly the plane into those targets any more than the White House or the Capitol? It is distinctly possible that these people were acting entirely out of self-interest and survival. I imagine most would, if the only alternative were death. But I'm not sure how that becomes heroism. I suppose I can expect a flood of hate mail now, but I fail to see which part of what they did can be teased apart from a simple desire not to die. Is that itself heroic?

United 93 is as free of schmaltz and emotional manipulation as a movie can be, but it is not too dour to recognize acts of genuine bravery.

Leaving aside what I just offered by way of response to the latter half of that, this film is as manipulative as any film that deals with subject matter like this. Any attempt to get you to feel anything is accomplished throught the care of the filmmaker to elicit such a response. The trick is whether or not you feel it happening. Movies are like watching magic tricks: if you spot how he does it, it's not magic. And if you don't spot how he does it, then it IS magic... even though you know it's actually just a sleight of hand.

it recreates the overpowering experience—the sense of loss, the bewilderment and shock, the unshakeable feeling that everything, somehow, has changed.

Could not disagree more. The fundamental problem with this film is that its designed perspective is one so foreign to us that there can be no real evocation of that 9/11 experience. There were very few people in this country who experienced 9/11 from an air traffic control room. That was an experience to which virtually no one has access. The flight scenes work somewhat better in that we've probably all conjured some sense in our imagination of what that experience might have been like. The extent to which the film gets close probably determines its power to you. But the scenes in the control rooms convey no sense of mounting shock. It's a very business-like atmosphere and they are so focused on the particulars that there isn't time to consider the world-shaking effect of what is happening.

I bought the CBS book and DVD "What We Saw" about 9/11. It has the footage from the CBS This Morning broadcast on that day. Bryant Gumbel breaks in and announces that a plane has hit one of the towers. But the atmosphere is still one mostly of calm. It's like any breaking story that seems to have some importance, but you still somehow feel safe in your chair. You can't quite grasp the relevance because you don't even know yourself how big a story it is. Then the second plane hits on live TV and you hear the TV crew gasp... THAT'S when everything changed. That was the collective moment when we all of a sudden didn't feel safe in our chairs. We got up, paced around, worked on our disbelief. We called family and friends. We felt that the atmosphere had palpably changed. Nobody needed to be told at that point or after that the story was important.

And that's the experience that can occasionally be summoned forth with certain visuals and documentary material. That's how we felt it because weren't tracking blips on a screen. We weren't calling into cockpits and getting static. Frankly, United 93's biggest contribution is that it DOESN'T make us feel that way. To be in that plane is to NOT really grasp what's happening. I think we too often attribute a retrospectively grandiose motivation to the passenger's actions. Even though they were told about the previous crashes, does anyone seriously believe that without the power of television and its imagery, the passengers were actually able to put together just how much the country had been torn asunder at least psychologically? It's just not likely at all. So while that is a distinct perspective, it is not one we have shared to this point and that's what makes it worth seeing. The movie isn't about re-experiencing 9/11... it's about experiencing it for the first time through a different lens. And not from the perspective of the one sympathetic character we've been following the whole movie, but through a sort of community eye. But since no one lived to tell about it, that makes it manipulative.

I think it's fine to make this movie. I think it's fine to see it. And I don't think it's a bad film per se. I just happen to think its strength lies anywhere but where the author of that article put it.

One final point: I actually think the crowd on the political right has been wrong to bemoan the lack of 9/11 news footage being replayed regularly. Not because I think we ought to forget what happened, but because I think if all the images of that day were replayed constantly, they would lose their resonance. They would become the desktop wallpaper of the news. And we'd cinematize the events until that day existed almost too much as just a bad movie in our heads. I think footage should be shown, but sparingly and only when we our determination in this struggle wanes, or when we truly seek to memorialize the dead, or really remind ourselves of the brutality of that day. But showing it EVERY day would have accomplished just the reverse effect.