Author: Adam (Page 8 of 224)

I know The Lifetime Movie Title Generator has been around for ages, but it’s damn funny.

Another bit of much-needed humor comes to me courtesy of the estimable Miss Anthropy, who sent along a link to these banners, which would be perfect if they were narrow enough to fit into my page design.

There’s a lot of stuff I could be writing about these days. I could be writing about our forces killing 40 people at an Iraqi wedding. I could be writing about a pattern of abuse that was set in motion from Rumsfeld on down. I could be writing about how a guest on Bill O’Reilly’s show last night called for the U.S. to formally declare war on “The Nation of Terrorism,” which I think would be slightly difficult to find on a map. I could be writing about right-wing nostalgia for the days of Japanese internment camps. I could be writing about the latest anti-gay rhetoric on right-wing sites, spurred by the Massachusetts marriages, that goes something like “If we could only figure out what made them gay in the first place, we could switch them back and everything would be peachy-keen. Plus, no new ones!”

But I find I have a lot of anger these days. And when I try to write about this stuff, I can’t even form my usual sentences. Kim “the rags are fucked” du Toit talks about the “red curtain of blood,” and I must say in this case I think I understand what he’s talking about. Where I used to feel depressed, now mainly I just feel angry.

I know this is not healthy. Maybe I need a stuffed GWB and a wiffle bat. Or at least some better movies to review.

Does anyone out there have an invitation to a Google Gmail account they could spare? If you do, you’d instantly become my new best friend. I’d really like to check Gmail out. Many thanks.

“It’s not you, it’s me. I just think I could do better.”

-Reese’s now-ex-girlfriend, on “Malcolm in the Middle”

“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.
——-
“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.