Month: May 2004 (Page 3 of 5)

“The sacred institution of marriage should not be redefined by a few activist judges,” said President Bush, renewing his support for a proposed constitutional ban that has been introduced in Congress.
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“Fifty years ago today, nine judges announced that they had looked at the Constitution and saw no justification for the segregation and humiliation of an entire race,” Bush said at the opening of a national historic site at Monroe Elementary, a former all-black school in the heartland of the school desegregation effort.

I sincerely hope that quotes like the first one, and all the vitriol that’s been spread about same-sex marriage, are archived and trotted out to amazed eyes in another 50 years, when the idea of denying gay people basic rights is just as unthinkable as denying black people’s rights is today.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the fat man will have the last laugh.

I want to see this film so bad.

Atrios hits on something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately: the willingness of the right to twist itself into rhetorical knots to cover all possible eventualities. They’ll defend anything, if the administration or its allies are doing it; and also defend the opposite, just in case.

While I was on hiatus, reading much more of right-wing rant weblogs than is good for my health, I started collecting these contortions for future posting. Here are some common ones:

“Iraq had lots of ties to al Qaeda, but even if they didn’t, it doesn’t matter.”

“Nick Berg’s murder is the media’s fault. Wait, it’s those evil Arabs – they don’t need an excuse to kill us. But the press are still traitorous bastards.”

It must get tiring.

This is a glorious day – the first gay couples are legally marrying in Massachusetts today. Congratulations to them all. How can anyone look into the faces of these couples and say this isn’t a good thing?

I spent the first half of Wolfgang Petersen’s epic “Troy” trying to understand why he made such a disastrous decision to cast Brad Pitt as the ultimate warrior, Achilles.

I spent the second half realizing that it just might have been an inspired choice.

That’s pretty much how I reacted to everything in the movie. In the beginning I was both skeptical and sort of bored – oh yeah, here comes another massive CGI battle scene. After “Two Towers,” my expectations for that sort of thing are ridiculously high.

But then I began to get into the groove of the story, and appreciate how the script was much better than it had a right to be. There’s a lot said in the margins about why we go to war, who suffers and who benefits. I admit that I may be an impartial observer in this regard, seeing parallels to current events where there are none. But how timely is a story about war fought on a flimsy pretext?

Plus there’s Julie Christie as Achilles’ mother, the goddess Thetis, and Peter O’Toole as Troy’s king Priam, whose scene with Achilles is definitely the high point of the film.

And then there’s Brad Pitt. When I first saw the preview and someone said, “We’re going to need the world’s greatest warrior,” followed by an image of Brad, I laughed.

But as the movie went along, I started to realize what Petersen was saying about Achilles. He wasn’t some battle-scarred veteran, an ancient Patton. He was born half-immortal, and destined for his warrior ways. He didn’t want to spend his life fighting and killing, but it was his inescapable nature. In the Salon review they said Pitt’s Achilles was a caricature of a spoiled movie star. And while they meant it as a slam, for me that’s the essence of the character.

Recommended.

This is my new favorite web site, courtesy of satires like “Bush Would Have Kept Medals If He Had Earned Any, Says Hughes.” But the whole site is great.

Bite my shiny metal ass.

I had a dream last night that I was in a giant amusement park, sort of a live-action version of “The Simpsons.” Everything had that Simpsons cartoon look to it. There were also other cartoon and pop-culture figures running around the streets.

Then somehow I changed from being a tourist to working there. I played Ricky Ricardo and my wife (?) played Lucy; I remember the neighbors, who played Fred and Ethel Mertz, coming in to our house to wake us up for work.

Also, the “sky” was really a dome over the whole park, sort of like “The Truman Show.” I had the power of flight, so at one point in the dream I zoomed up to the top of the dome and touched the fluffy stuff that the clouds were made of.

Wait – I think I just blew my own mind.

Where do I start with this colossal mess? Think of it this way: take “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” and ratchet everything wrong with that movie up to 11. There! You made “Van Helsing.”

Hugh Jackman is a tremendously appealing actor, but he’s lost in a brain-searing stew of overbearing special effects. The score is one musical crescendo after another. Like many contemporary action movies, every scene is a climax; there’s absolutely no ebb and flow. When everything matters, nothing matters.

There are lots of other problems with this movie (don’t get me started on Kate Beckinsale’s accent). But for me it comes down to, getting smacked in the face for two hours isn’t fun.

I think the only way to do this story would have been to make it a real low-budget, low-tech spookfest – an indie “Van Helsing.” Don’t spend millions of dollars showing us a man transforming into a werewolf; we’ve seen that a million times, and it hasn’t been impressive since “American Werewolf in London.” And it’s not scary. What is scary, and interesting, is the unknown; the wait to see what will happen. Here, you’re never waiting – something’s always slamming into your skull.

As the brilliant Jonathan Demme proved in “Silence of the Lambs,” what your brain can imagine is 1,000 times scarier and more engaging than what can be put on screen.

I’ve been banned by another right-wing site, La Shawn Barber’s Corner. Sounds like such a comfy and welcoming place, doesn’t it? 🙂 Well, I guess after she offered her enthusiastic support of the torture at Abu Ghraib, and one of her commenters suggested that I should wear a sign reading “I Support Islamist Thugs!” (love the exclamation point), there’s not much reason for me to hang around there, anyway.

Before the prison scandal broke, I would continually tell myself that things weren’t as polarized in this country as they seemed to me. I was just reading all these right-wing rant sites, so that gave me an unrealistic picture of how fucking insane this country has become.

I was wrong.

When people from U.S. Senators on down are not only excusing torture, but endorsing it, I think we’ve lost our way. The question is whether we can ever find it again.