Pandagon

Personal Responsibility

Wal*Mart is getting ready to sell a DVD player that strips out the offensive content of movies for you.

Now, if you want to take precautions on live television, fine. But nobody forces you to put anything into your DVD player. If you want to watch a movie, but without the sex, swearing or violence, here's a novel idea: there are thousands upon thousands of movies on VHS and DVD. Watch something else.

I can't decide if this is just lazy or stupid, but part of me really wants to see the Clearplay version of Wild Things. I've heard it's thirty minutes of the finest Matt Dillon standing, sitting, walking, and blurting out sentence fragments that Hollywood has to offer.

Partisan Comedy

A bit earlier, i read this great cartoon from Chris Ferris. Shortly after, I saw another right-winger in the daily effort to applaud the brilliance of Day by Day, a cartoon whose humor must be going over my head as I rarely find it funny. It got me to thinking about how the right and the left compare in comedy (and I don't just mean who's easier to make fun of). I remember when Instapundit was telling us how liberals were losing because we were all serious all the time. But we've got Chris Rock, Margaret Cho, Al Franken, Tom Tomorrow, Janeane Garafalo, The Boondocks, Doonesbury and countless others. The right's got Dennis Miller who, at this point, actually takes away from their funny. PJ O'Rourke is running around, but I've heard little from him lately. And this Day by Day toon is what they seem intent on selling, but its humor tends to be, well, a snarky blogger in a comic strip. And not even a very snarky one at that. What accounts for the disparity?

MST4K

Blowjobs from toothless prostitutes, puking on keyboards and three stooges impressions, this will either be the best or worst movie ever made.

Streaming Down A River

The Air America stream is here:

http://play.rbn.com/?url=airam/airam/live/live.rm

Jesus, Jesus

Janet Jackson got bleeped last night for saying "Jesus" during an interview with David Letterman.

At this point, she should just show up in this with a copy of the Ten Commandments any time she's invited anywhere. If they don't bleep out the God parts for fear of offending...God knows who.

Can I fucking say that?

Wrestlemania! (Just Like That! Just Like That!)

Finally, a disagreement with Jonah Goldberg that can be settled without coming to verbal blows!

The Rock follows a long line of professional wrestlers (well, relatively speaking) who went into films retaining his pro wrestling name. In fact, Roddy Piper still maintained his kayfabe name, given that his real name was Roderick George Toombs.

Other great thespians include Terry Gene Bollea (Hulk Hogan for the uninitiated) and Randy Poffo ("Macho Man" Randy Savage, also the voice behind a 50 Cent-endorsed rap album). Amazingly, I know this more because it's a constant that professional wrestlers tend to have incredibly dorky real-life names (re: Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson).

Movies

So I saw Fog of War last night. It was entertaining, enjoyable and informative, but I really didn't feel that it lived up to the hype. The lessons and "conclusions" in the movie seemed pretty commonplace and the constant contrasting of statistics and human lives was contrived and, eventually, tiresome. McNamara is sharp as a tack at 85 and gave a really interesting interview, but as a whole, I think the movie fell a little short of where it could have gone.

The night before I saw Shattered Glass, the movie following The New Republic's lying report Stephen Glass. I loved it, one of the best fils I've seen this year. If you're at all interested in journalism, and even if you're not, give it a chance. You won't be disappointed. And if you rent the DVD, make sure to watch the 60 Minutes interview with the real Stephen Glass after you watch the film. Seeing him employ the same sort of emotional manipulations that the movie so effectively shows is really interesting. Contrition as a career move indeed.

Great News

Looks like my weeknights are full for the next four years:

Unfortunately, this disqualifies him from running in 2008; guess you can't have everything.

I'll Chip In...Five Bucks - It's All I've Got

A fluff article on Chappelle's Show in the New York Post today leads me to declare that I really, really like Dave Chappelle and his show. And I had an idea a few weeks ago to interview him, but I can only find contact information to book him for a show - which would not only be prohibitively expensive, but also sort of hard to communicate to you all.

Starsky And Hutch

I saw Starsky and Hutch this past weekend, and I have one major thought: can Ben Stiller and Martin Lawrence get together and make the cop movie they've been leading up to this whole time?

Ben Stiller as the anal-retentive, uptight cop! Martin Lawrence as the wacky and streetwise cop/criminal/criminal masquerading as cop! After it's done, we never speak of these roles again, and America can live knowing that the cinematic reign of Stiller the Tense is done!

The movie itself was a forgettable, if entertaining bit - like most of the other 60s/70s TV-to-film adaptations, they focus almost entirely on nostalgic kitsch and lampooning the original show. I just wish Ben Stiller didn't always play his uptight character - he's uptight and a cop! He's uptight in a jogging suit! He's uptight and getting married! He's uptight and masturbating! He's uptight and searching for his parents!

I actually liked Vince Vaughn, though, which is pretty much a first. I say see it in theaters if you're interested, but wait until it reaches the budget cinema.

Hollywood Should Never Push Politics...Except Now

The Corner is castigating a bunch of celebrities for embarking upon a mission to promote peace in Israel, calling them "clownish" and "idiots".

One wonders how they'll react to Hollywood making a White House-endorsed Department of Homeland Security show with very real political overtones.

I'll be writing this later, but I find it amazing how Hollywood actors become scapegoats for political activism that conservatives hate. Particularly when the President of the United States is actively flirting with Hollywood over an adoring television series. Conservatives preach aversion to Hollywood, then turn around and embrace it when it pushes their values. Even if Hollywood shouldn't be pushing values at all (according to them), so long as someone's on their knees in front of a lifesize cutout of Ronald Reagan and/or Jesus before the credits roll...well, maybe they misspoke.

The Bible - Unabridged

I've said very little about The Passion thus far. That's partly because I've made an effort not to follow the coverage and partly because I've had nothing terribly original to say about it. But I saw it being discussed tonight on Hardball and think I have one thing to add.

The debate over this movie is a proxy discussion; it's a safe and easy method of getting at a deeper, more painful, conversation. If you attack Gibson's movie you're a film critic, not a heretic. Regardless, the discussion that Passion demands and its detractors steadfastly avoid is somewhat heretical.

Quite simply, The Passion's problem is its accuracy. It's accurate in its anti-semitism, accurate in being gruesome and accurate in demonizing certain groups of people. This is because the Bible, or at least certain Gospels, do all of these things. Normally, we ignore these transgressions. Neither Jews nor Christians talk much about how patently ridiculous the characterization of Pontius Pilate is; nor do they mention how this brutal ruler is twisted into a benign sovereign so the Jews can play the role of villains. You can ignore it, but you can't escape the fact that the Bible, the single most influential document in this country (I rank it above the Constitution in influence, if not in legal authority), contains a disturbing amount of xenophobia, divisive precepts and upsetting rules.

Now, this is not to condemn the Bible as a bad or evil book. It's neither and the vast majority of its adherents take the good and leave the bad. But it's a more morally mixed bag than most would like to admit. Further, the accounts are contradictory and thus certainly flawed, yet we are unwilling to throw any away. The rules that the Christian Right has latched onto for their moral crusades versus those they ignore speak volumes about their motivations and points to a selective interpretation of the faith that simply does not square with the literal interpretations they claim to live by.

The Passion has aroused so much ire not because of anything Gibson did, but because of what he didn't do. He refused to take the edited Bible most Americans believe in and instead portrayed the unabridged version, exposing both the good and the bad that lay therein. Thus, everyone is having to speak not about the dominant Christianity we see around us but the literal Christianity that springs from the Bible. And a lot of people are not happy with what they're seeing.

Carrie vs. Kimmel

In a fierce torrent of idiocy, Jonah Goldberg has managed to equate The Man Show with Sex and the City and blame the distorting lens of feminism for why one is celebrated and the other reviled.

Is there some universe in which this criticism is anything but laughable, much less intellectually acceptable? The revolutionary thing about Sex and the City isn't what it says but what it reflects. Women (and men) find a fair amount of truth within the fictionalized series and they find it in a context that doesn't sugarcoat the path that led to the revelation. Sex is complicated and the show is willing, unlike most, to face that simple fact head on. Real people don't like puritanical lifestyles and SatC has been successful because its characters don't either.

The Man Show, on the other hand, is a parody characterized by prancing midgets and bouncing models. It is Maxim gone cable and it claims to be nothing more. The reason The Man Show is not seen as a cultural lighthouse is because it isn't one, it's a frat party on television. The reason Sex and the City is seen as a significant program is that it illuminate and comments on the disconnected lifestyles of urban professionals with a candor that no other programs have even attempted.

Who Knew?

Dan Akroyd is secretly Bill Safire.

Ah, Coldplay

"We'd like to dedicate this [Grammy] to...John Kerry, who will hopefully be your President."

I take back everything I ever said about your mothers. Which was nothing. But, still.

Quandary For The Night

Which is less meaningless - the Pro Bowl or the Grammys?

Janet Jackson For President

Janet Jackson's breast could not only solve our national budget deficit, but also our national unemployment problem.

In case you're wondering, she's asking for per person damages. It's estimated that at least 90 million Americans watched the Super Bowl. You do the math.

Can we stop these sorts of frivolous lawsuits? Doctor chops off the wrong leg - let's limit that to $250,000, because we can't harm the incompetent doctors. CBS accidentally airs Janet Jackson's naked breast? Billions of dollars in potential damages.

Does anyone else think that the collective damage done to our nation's youth will be forgotten as soon as the kids inevitably sneak a peek at a Playboy, a National Geographic, or the parental lock code for Cinemax?

Tag Team

Al Franken apparently went into a berserker rage, body slamming a heckler at a Dean event. I say apparently because the New York Post has the tendency to be full of shit. However, if it is true, I think we've found Dean's ideal running mate. Forget a ticket, these two could be a tag team.

Shocking

Art Garfunkel has been charged with marijuana possession. In other news, President Bush's writers are already hard at work on the next State of the Unions speech where Bush is expected to build upon his success eliminating performance enhancing drugs in sports by asking aging rock stars to realize that "weed makes you bleed" and "tobacco is whacko (if you're a teen). Reports that "E makes you pee" and "coke makes you broke" are, as of now, unconfirmed but suspected additions to the speech.

The Headlines Just Write Themselves

Give your best caption.

Cosmo

Did you know that Cosmopolitan started out in the early 1900’s as a progressive magazine publishing primarily subversive article by muckrakers? Congratulations guys, it’s been a long, steep road down to becoming cultural trash.

Jonah's Right

I headed on over to The Corner for some easy content making fun of Jonah Goldberg, but he surprised me and wrote something that I not only agreed with, but found perceptive:

Right on.

Bumpin Hobbit Uglies

Jonathan Last notices exactly what I did in the last Lord of the Rings movie. Namely, that it in addition to not being very good, it is very homoerotic:

In that last scene, I was waiting for the porn music to start up. Such a soulful gaze Sam and Frodo shared...

Sometimes A Drunk Dwarf Is Just That

From Patrick Nielsen Hayden, in comments:

I call rewrite on this one. It's like parlay, but I'm the captain.

Anyway, what I'm trying to get at is that Patrick's comparison brought to mind a branch of literary interpretation that tends to happen a lot for political reasons (which I, for some unknown reason referred to as postmodernism, when I think I meant modernism or something else - write when you're coherent, Jesse). Namely, the sense that one can not only pull a thematic resonance from a piece of literature, but also that you can make direct one-to-one comparisons, no matter how inapt they actually are. Not saying that Patrick is doing this (at all) - but it just brought that issue to mind.

I was also bitching about the overextension of interpretation, which came more from college classes where people with specific agendas managed to turn the interpretation of all literature into a continual address of their pet topic. In many ways, I felt privy to literary hijackings, where someone was straining to find the issues they were concerned about in texts that barely dealt with the topics, if at all - and I used some bad examples for that.

And to the person who said I was apparently attacking postmodernism to get PayPal donations - everyone knows that you attack falsification doctrines for the big bucks.

Anyway, have at it. It's not been a particularly good past day, and I'm on edge right now.

Why Texas is So Fucked Up

Cause they can't get no satisfaction:

Don't look at me, I got nothing. This is ridiculous enough.

I Have A Proposition For You Mr Kline

You know all those African bankers/widows/relatives/finance ministers/elves/Townhall columnists who send you E-mail asking for your assistance in recovering 30 million dollars lost during the great unicorn invasion of eleventy hundred? Why do they do it? I mean, I understand that sending it once or twice might prick the interest of some gullible AOL user, but I get those things every day. And it seems to me that repeated exposure to them merely lessens their impact and credibility, after all, there simply can't be that much random money floating around that you get randomly contacted that often to help recover it. I understand why penis pill ads are sent constantly. They're waiting for your girlfriend to break up with you. You wake up the next morning wondering if three more inches would have kept her happier. I understand why weight loss ads, credit help, and porn is sent repeatedly, sometimes the mood strikes and you want to get in shape, consolidate your debt, and pretend hot women will sleep with you.

But these Nigerian get rich quick scams lose their effectiveness with each successive exposure. As such, why do they keep sending them? Is it simply that spam is cheap? After all, it seems that if they sent one random person one of them every 3 days, no one would know what they were and the chances of success would be far greater. If you can provide me with an answer, I'll give you a cut once I find the lost fortune of Jonah Goldberg's elvish, Nigerian grandmother. After all, when you have a 17 inch penis, you can afford to be generous (Hi Kate!).

Dirty Campaigning

In the Dean Campaign's latest E-Mail, Joe Trippi says:

This is something Trippi mentions a lot, that politics has become so dirty that people don't vote. But does anyone really believe that? I know I don't. People don't vote because politics is boring, confusing, slow, on at the same time as Friends, and not directly applicable to their lives. Someone (I forgot who) recently mentioned that our low turnout is the hallmark of a stable society, and I think that's true. People feel that, in general, both parties are okay so voting really doesn't matter much.

I don't think that people are turned off because politics are dirty. In general, people like dirty, personal fights. If politics were more like Ali-Frazier, more people would be interested in elections. But the swipes are strange, the negative stuff comes from unknown organizations, what comes out of the candidate's mouths tends to be boring and qualified ("My opponent is a wonderful, super human being but his sanitation proposal is clearly lackluster, in my opinion"), so why watch it? If candidates got up there and were really dirty, insulting each other's mothers, going after their children, and so forth, people would watch. That's why we need to run Jesse Springer and Howard Stern, and run them as they are on their shows. People will watch, I guarantee it.

Last note. Nothing was dirtier than what happened to Clinton. Going after his infidelity was a very low blow. Everything they said about him was dirty and usually unfair. But say what you will about the Republicans, Newt Gingrich's denouncements of Clinton's epic immorality made for good TV, and people watched. And so stations covered it. And Gingrich blanketed the airwaves eventually turning the country against Clinton, at least for a period of time. The elections of 1994 were far more interesting than those of 2002.

I Loves Me The Sexy

Babes Against Bush.

Meanwhile, the Libertarian Ladies of Liberty. And, to be fair, the Republican Babes. Although many of them are only babes if you have a fetish for pantsuits, the faint whiff of paprika and/or accusations of treason...but I know some people are into that sort of thing.