Category: words mean things (Page 21 of 223)

Admission

All this crowing over Saddam has me thinking about Howard Dean. I so want Dean to win, mainly because I think he’s the right man for the job, and because he can begin to dig us out of the hole we made for ourselves. He stands up for what he believes in, the Democratic values that are actually shared by a large majority of our country’s population.

But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that a part of me wants Dean to win so all the right-wingers, religious conservatives, and neocons can eat dirt. I’d love to see them take a nice big mouthful. They deserve every morsel.

Is it just me, or is Mrs. du Toit’s online Christmas card mind-numbingly hilarious, on multiple levels?

Listening to…

“Be Careful,” Patty Griffin

Can you tell I like Patty Griffin? 🙂 Her songs have such resonance for me, for many reasons. I feel like she came along just when I needed her.

Saddam

What can I say that hasn’t already been said? Saddam’s capture is a great thing for the Iraqi people, and a great thing for our troops. I hope he’s tried by Iraqis or by a world court, and not by the U.S. But the inescapable fact is: Saddam captured alive + no shots fired = A Good Thing.

At the same time, I hate the thought of the political hay that the Bushies will make of capturing a man who had nothing to do with the War on Terror (if we even know what that is anymore).

But that’s OK. My friend Lisa says it’s all right for me to have mixed feelings about this. And I trust Lisa’s advice in all things.

Scoring movie reviews

Steve has suggested that I use a rating scale (stars? numbers?) in my movie reviews. In the past I’ve specifically avoided that; I think a movie deserves discussion, not just a number attached to it. But if enough people want me to start doing this, I will. (I definitely won’t do just a “thumbs up/thumbs down” thing, though.) Let me know what you think of in the comments.

The Last Samurai

Tom Cruise tries hard. In every role he plays, you can almost feel his effort oozing out of every pore. You can imagine him in front of the mirror in his trailer, repeating “I *am* a disillusioned Civil War hero!” over and over. He never relaxes, and that gets tiring. He’s trying so hard *not* to be the instantly-recognizable Hollywood star that he actually is, he doesn’t let us in.

That’s less of a problem with contemporary movies like “Jerry Maguire” or futuristic ones like “Minority Report,” where Cruise’s teeth-grinding intensity can be used to better effect. But he’s wildly miscast in this “epic,” another non-Western story told with a Western white male as its protagonist. I couldn’t stop thinking, whenever he was on screen, “There’s Tom Cruise!” That’s deadly for a historical drama.

Not that this movie doesn’t have other problems. It’s two and a half hours long, and includes (conservatively) 3,613 impalings. It goes through the motions of an epic, with its hero learning the value of honor blah blah blah. But it feels plastic, no matter how beautiful the rural Japan landscapes may be. There’s no beating heart at the core of this story.

One example: we’re often treated to voice-over readings of Capt. Algren’s diaries kept while in Japan, where he talks about how the samurai are “an intriguing people” and some such. Memo to screenwriters: show, not tell.

It’s not a particularly bad movie, and there are some interesting and fun performances from supporting players (Timothy Spall as the translator, and a woefully underused Billy Connolly as Algren’s military colleague). But there isn’t anything all that good about it, either. It’s another product of the Hollywood epic machine, which should have clogged itself up years ago.

But hey, if you love Tom Cruise, go for it. And if you love impalings, this is the Movie of the Year.

Word of the day

crampon

“Adam could have used some crampons during his walk around the neighborhood, since the sidewalks were dangerously icy.”

Now I believe

Bill Kristol’s latest column should be titled “How Dean Will Win.” Stunning truth-telling from smirking Fox News Sunday panelist Kristol.

Bring in on, baby. Bring it on.

Timeline

I want a catapult for Christmas.

That said, this movie would have been good if it had had decent acting, passable writing, competent production design and respectable direction. It had none of those things.

The biggest failing of this Michael Crichton time-travel “epic” is its deadly dullness. And how can you make the combination of time travel and medieval combat dull? Bad acting, writing, production design and direction, that’s how. I was especially struck by how cheap and thrown-together everything looked – it was like “Excalibur” put on by third graders. The whole movie felt like a bunch of rehearsal scenes strung together at the last minute when the final takes were destroyed in a fire.

Give this premise to, say, James Cameron, and replace the it-insults-wood-to-call-him-wooden Paul Walker with someone interesting (dare I say Colin Farrell?), and you might very well have something. This, not so much.

Quote of the day

Right-wing convert Christopher Hitchens, on 9/11 (via Atrios):

“Watching the towers fall in New York, with civilians incinerated on the planes and in the buildings, I felt something that I couldn?t analyze at first and didn?t fully grasp (partly because I was far from my family in Washington, who had a very grueling day) until the day itself was nearly over. I am only slightly embarrassed to tell you that this was a feeling of exhilaration [emphasis mine. -AJB]. Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose. A pity that we let them pick the time and place of the challenge, but we can and we will make up for that.”

Amazing that right-wingers are finally admitting, as Atrios put it, that 9/11 “gave them a big stiffy.” This sickens me. But it’s the elephant in the room – the thing that everyone knows but no one, on either side, is willing to admit: 9/11 was the best damn thing that ever happened to the neocon agenda.

I think I’m going to go throw up.