Month: May 2004 (Page 5 of 5)

It’s no secret that I’m a big Jennifer Garner fan. I even wrote what amounts to “Alias” fan fiction (or is it parody?) back in the day. So I was looking forward to Garner’s update of “Big.”

Now here’s where you expect me to say, what a letdown, right? But the funny thing is, I really enjoyed myself. Garner is sweet and funny, and proves she can carry a movie easily. There’s a little too much teen girl wish fulfillment, especially at the end, but they also avoid falling into about 2,178 holes that are possible in a story like this.

One of my favorite parts was the casting of a pudgy, goofy, awkward kid as the 13-year-old counterpart of Mark Ruffalo. Any movie that says that kid can grow up to be Mark Ruffalo, a man I would happily watch read the phone book for two hours, is OK in my book.

Another great thing is the real chemistry between Ruffalo and Garner, something that can make or break a romantic comedy. They’ve got it.

This movie was fluffy and wispy and girly. And I liked it. Sue me. 🙂

Lots has already been said about Pat Tillman, the NFL player who gave up a multi-million-dollar career to become an Army Ranger, fighting in Afghanistan where he was killed.

But one thing that hasn’t been said a lot is the despicable nature of the right, willing to use this man’s death as a rallying cry for a horrible war. They attack the Nightline “Fallen” program as propaganda, but can’t resist parading Tillman around like a poster boy, complete with tearful elegies and junior-high-level poetry to a man they never met. That sickens me.

Fortunately, Tillman’s brother Rich injected a little humanity during Pat’s memorial service.

“Pat isn’t with God,” he said. “He’s fucking dead. He wasn’t religious. So thank you for your thoughts, but he’s fucking dead.”

Rich Tillman was talking about people imposing their religious beliefs on the service. But he could have easily been talking about the right-wing’s willingness to use his brother’s death for “They killed *one of us*!” propaganda.

Pat Tillman deserves better than that, especially in death.

I actually went to two “teen” movies in one week – the second was “Mean Girls,” starring Lindsay Lohan of “Freaky Friday” and “The Parent Trap” and written by Tina Fey, the first ever female head writer on Saturday Night Live and an incredibly cool person.

It was definitely entertaining, although I don’t think teen girls will find it worth sitting through. The humor is idiosyncratic and adult, and often I was the only one laughing at Fey’s slyly mocking humor. And toward the end it appears to lose its way, sort of becoming an “Afterschool Special” on self-esteem in spite of itself. Still, it’s hard not to like a movie that names its disaffected outcast teen girl character “Janis Ian.”

One thing that’s definitely noticeable to everyone in the audience is the…shall we say….development of 17-year-old Lohan. As we were leaving the theater, one of my companions said something about Lohan’s performance, and in my classic style, I said all too loudly, “And what about the giant knockers on that girl!” This outburst caused a group of teenage girls, no doubt waiting for the next show of the same movie, to regard me with disgust.

I’m sure those girls *should* regard me with disgust – just not for the reasons they think.

Since I’ve been gone from words mean things, I’ve been banned from two right-wing weblogs: Dean Esmay and Mrs. du Toit.

In some ways I’m sad about this. Going on those sites and calling them on their outrageous statements was a sort of “Fight Club”-esque therapy for me, and I don’t have that anymore. (The links above are to the specific threads where I was finally banned, after they ran out of right-wing talking points to bludgeon me with.) But they’ve proved themselves to be such hate-filled ideologues that maybe it’s best to leave them to congratulate each other on their superior moral fiber and rock-solid patriotism.

One of the things that began to get my goat was the epithet “moonbat” (also “barking moonbat” and “raving moonbat” and others) for anyone to the left of Bill O’Reilly. The Dean Esmay thread where I was finally banned, in fact, dealt with that very subject.

So I’ve decided to coin my own term for those xenophobic, warmongering, violence-addicted, reactionary, Bush-worshipping, anti-gay members of the rabid right currently dominating political discourse in this country: crapweasels. A common specific would be “neocon crapweasel.”

I feel this word exactly captures both their motives and the effect they have on anyone with an ounce of common sense within their shouting distance. And as a word person from way back, I’m pleased with it. I’ve even made it a category on this new site, so you can get my crapweasel updates whenever you want.

Feel free to use “crapweasel” as you see fit.