C'est Non Un Blog

[From darkhorizons.com]

Creature Corner reports that New Line is already hard at work on developing potential sequel ideas to their current team-up project and there’s already a theory – “Reliable sources have revealed that one of the current ideas being tossed around includes a scenario where Freddy and Jason would team-up against a common enemy: Bruce Campbell as Ash from the “Evil Dead” films. As crazy as it might sound, this concept has apparently been met with a great deal of enthusiasm in the upper-echelons of New Line Cinema. While it’s impossible to predict what sort of “unknowns” might prevent this concept from seeing the light of day (like, say, the rights holders of the “Evil Dead” series or Campbell himself saying no) it’s interesting to know that New Line is at least considering what could turn out to be many a fanboy’s dream team-up “plus one” for the not-to-distant future”. Thanks to ‘Rotten Scoundrel’

[From the Entertainment Weekly website]

The Jennifer Lopez/Ben Affleck bomb suffered the biggest second-weekend drop of all time, plummeting an absolutely ridiculous 83 percent to $600,000 despite playing in the same number of theaters as last weekend. Its per-theater average for the weekend was a laughable $288. (That’s 288 DOLLARS.) After 10 days, ”Gigli” has earned $5.6 million, roughly one-fifth of the couple’s combined $25 million salary. An episode of ”Baywatch” would probably fare better.

JFK really opened my eyes wide open (see previous post), when before they were only squinting at best. If even half of the shit in that movie is true then the implications against our government are gigantic. The War Department, CIA, FBI, and Secret Service all worked together to kill Kennedy, and they probably did the same to RFK, Martin Luther King Jr. and countless others too. Why? Because peace is the enemy of the American government.

The biggest business in America is its war machine. Our product is death. We take it door to door and push it on people who don’t think they need it, but we convince them they do. The American public pays for all of this, and when it comes to a major war we’re the ones who fight it too. I’ve had taxes taken out of my wages. I’ve also sent in my draft card. To think that this is an issue that has nothing to do with me is just foolish. Next year I could be lying on my back in a field in North Korea dying. I don’t want that.

JFK was killed because he wanted out of Vietnam. It was a legacy that he had inherited from Eisenhower, who is turn inherited it from Truman. I’m not trying to paint JFK as a saint, because he did increase the number of advisors in Vietnam while he was president, but as more and more reports from MacNamera (I think that’s how you spell his name. Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I just don’t feel like looking it up) came in to him, JFK started having second thoughts and wanted to pull out. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco JFK started pulling back on all military expenditures, moving away from war. You can see this in the treaty he signed with the USSR to stop nuclear testing, and in the Cuban Missile Crisis where this country came the closest its ever come to nuclear war, our only savior being Kennedy’s quick thinking and peaceful attitudes. The War Department didn’t like this (they get particularly nasty whenever funding is taken away) and so Kennedy needed to be eliminated in a conspiracy coup that put LBJ in place as our next president.

Look at what happened after that. Not long after assuming office Johnson reversed all of JFK’s policies concerning Vietnam. Not long after that was the Gulf of Tonkin incident which was the precedent for major military action in Vietnam. After the Tonkin incident Johnson had no problem passing a bill in which Congress gave him all of the means necessary to take on his “police action.” We know now that the Tonkin incident was a fake. No Vietnamese patrol boat ever fired at a United States Navy vessel. The whole thing was a lie, not unlike the cover up of Kennedy’s assassination. But it was all that was needed to give LBJ more than enough power to wage war in Vietnam. In 1964 American troops were being sent to Vietnam. In November 1965, two full years after Kennedy’s assassination, was the battle of the Ia Drang valley, which was the first full-scale battle between the NVA regulars and the United States. After that battle America was fully committed to the war in Vietnam, in a place most American’s couldn’t locate on a map, against people that were no threat to the American way of life.

Want to know more about Vietnam? Ho Chi Mihn after the First World War went to the League of Nations summit and asked America to recognize an independent Vietnam. Wilson was sympathetic, but Vietnam was a French colony, and because of that factor and the fact that Vietnam was such a small and inconsequential country, Mihn’s pleas were ignored. Mihn was never a true Communist and only turned to Communism in order to get some backing, since the whole of the Western world was ignoring him. Mihn was a Nationalist through and through. During World War II Vietnam was taken over by the Japanese, and the Vietnamese people were treated even worse than the French was before treated them. After the War most Western nations were given their freedom, but since the economy of France was so weak and fragile America let France keep Vietnam as a colony in the hopes that the added income would help prevent the spread of Communism in western Europe. The Vietnamese staged a brutal war against the French, which the French ultimately lost. And yet the United States kept sending money and advisors to the South Vietnamese (who were simply using the USA for it’s own means) after the French had given up on Vietnam. Why? The spread of Communism. America was sore over the turn of China, and then the loss in Korea. Indo-China had been lost. The military needed funding, and the spread of Communism gave them all the necessity they needed in order to wage more wars.

Why did America lose in Vietnam? Probably for the same reason they went to Vietnam: incompetent leadership. I’ve read some many different accounts of kick ass platoons of soldiers that can do no wrong, only to be abused and misused by those above them. Generals like Westmoreland lost the war, not the grunts. The American military is the most highly trained, best equipped, and most advanced technologically military in the world. Used correctly they can do just about anything. And yet if a business were run in the same fashion as the war in Vietnam, that business would not last the year before going out of business. The men in command were so out of touch with the realities of the war that the whole thing was just ridiculous. When a GI came back from the war there were no ticker tape parades. No one told them “Thanks for doing a good job over there.” Instead they were called baby killers and spit on. Imagine you are a GI trained to kill, trained to follow the orders of those superior, and sent into an entirely hostile country where you can’t tell friend from foe. All of your friends are dying, and it’s your CO’s fault. What would you do?

It amazes me the amount of money that our government spends on the military. In a recession or a boom, it doesn’t matter, tax money is always going into the military. They control the government, even though the people are the ones that pay for it, and are the ones who fight in the wars. Where is this madness going to stop?

And try comparing Kennedy’s assassination to our present day events. This isn’t a problem that went away in the 70’s or 80’s. Consider the year 2000. Bush vs. Gore. Equal candidates and yet Bush wins even though the votes were with Gore. Who do you think set that up? Fast forward to Bush as president. He makes promises that he doesn’t keep, promises that make us all happy with him, and yet he doesn’t have to keep them. Why? September 11th comes. Anything Bush says or does after this is gold. 9/11 is the perfect distraction. Was it an accident? I don’t think so. Consider the following: recent evidence shows that the CIA and FBI knew about a possible attack using commercial jets. Washington paints this as agencies not sharing information and dropping the ball. I think they either let 9/11 happen, or worse, sponsored the attack. Look at the date. Could there be a more symbolic date than 9/11? It screams the same sentiment as “Remember Pearl Harbor.” Compare 9/11 to the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. After 9/11 Bush got all of the support he needed to fight the war on “Terror.”

Terror. Does that seem odd to anyone other than me? How the hell do you fight a war on Terror? In the early 90’s the Cold War was over. There was no more evil “Communism.” Washington no longer had a scape goat for future wars. We fought a war on Hunger but that didn’t go over really well. Fat American’s aren’t really afraid of Hunger while they are eating their Big Macs. Washington needed something ambiguous that they could rally around like Communism for all of their fake wars. Enter Terrorism. You can defeat Communism. Can you ever defeat Terror? I doubt it.

Since 9/11 we have fought wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the near future there is Libera and North Korea for us to kick around. Figureheads of Terror, Bin Laudin and Saddam, have not been caught. Or have they and we haven’t been told about it? Or are we just not looking? They make great symbols to scare us to sleep at night. As long as the boogiemen are on the loose we won’t feel bad about our continued presence in those countries. This is history repeating itself. The War Department owns America. And it will destroy America. The government seems only to be able to see in the present. What will help me get my opinion polls up? What will help me win the next election? No one looks to see what today’s actions will do to the America 50 years from now. No one looks to the past to compare to today. No one sees the trends. If things don’t change soon the world is going to be really fucked up by the time we are old and gray. I predict that big things are going to happen before we die (that is if we don’t die in wars before old age gets us). Things have got to change or else we’re all fucked.

I had a coupon for one free rental at Blockbuster. I’m home alone this weekend. I went a little crazy with the renting. So here are five reviews for five pretty high profile movies that I’ve never seen before. Enjoy.

——The Elephant Man——

I really enjoyed this one. This is David Lynch’s extremely touching telling of the Elephant Man story, probably the most subdued stylistically of all of his movies if only because it’s main character is bizarre enough already without needing Lynch to do any of his magic on it. The direction is excellent. It drops you right into Victorian London without any effort at all, the style, cutting, and camera work working perfectly for the period. The first third of the film involves slowly revealing the Elephant Man piece by piece, only intensifying the feeling that you are trying to get a peak at him at a freak show. He appears to be a monster at first, as horrible as his appearance, until that moment when he actually begins to speak and you realize at that moment that he is an extremely intelligent, articulate and sensitive human being. When you finally make this realization you feel so sad with all of the pity you now have towards him that all you want is to see him finally be happy after all the years of ridicule and abuse. Unfortunately, everything doesn’t work out perfectly for him. I can’t remember the last movie that I’ve felt so sympathetic towards the main character, or towards Anthony Hopkins’ extremely touching doctor who is struggling with his own demons as to whether or not he too is just exploiting the Elephant Man for his own gain. This is an excellent movie, definitely worth seeing.

(A)

——Donnie Brasco——

I love mob stuff. The Godfather movies are some of my favorites. I love the Sopranos. My favorite games right now are the Grand Theft Auto series. So while I enjoyed this movie quite a bit, I still don’t really see what the big fuss about it is. Everyone else seems to love it. I’m not sure if that’s because they love Johnny Depp and/or Al Pacino or what. For the most part this movie is like a really excellent episode of the Sopranos, paying a close examination of the not so glamorous aspects of Mafia life. But then about two-thirds of the way into the movie I was getting a little bored, hoping for something interesting to happen to shake things up a little to make this different from just about every other mob movie I’ve ever seen. I got what I asked for in the scene where Depp smacks around Anne Heche after not talking to the FBI for three weeks because he has serious feelings for Al Pacino’s loser character. The scene kills two birds with one stone, showing both his crumbling marriage and the reason why it’s crumbling: He can’t get out just yet or else everyone will know he was a snitch and kill Al because he vouched for Depp. This was the meat of the story I was looking forward to. Unfortunately the ending takes that conflict nowhere. The FBI pulls him out and that’s the end of the movie without any resolution to the main plot points. What happens to Al Pacino? Does he get wacked? How does Depp deal with this? What happens to his marriage? Does it recover? None of this is dealt with. I know it’s based on a true story, but come on. Throw me a bone here.

(B+)

——The Beach——

Trainspotting is awesome. 28 Days Later is really awesome. The Beach is…not. The cinematography is really pretty. The soundtrack contains lots of great electronica bands like The Chemical Brothers, Underworld and Leftfield. But the script is paper thin and poorly written. The voice over is horrible and unneeded. The dialog is pretty stupid, as is Leonardo DeCaprio. Now, enough time has gone by from Titanic for me to forgive him and give him the benefit of the doubt, but man do I really want to kill him in this movie for being such a dope. He’s an annoying brat. That makes it kind of hard for me to empathize with the larger issues of the movie, which I’m sure would have been better if the script was better. As it is this would have played a lot better as a B-Movie. I like Danny Boyle but I just didn’t buy this movie.

(B-)

——Raging Bull——

This is a superb film. Raging Bull features probably my favorite directing of any Scorsese film I’ve seen thus far. The boxing sequences are quite simply some of the most brutal things I’ve ever seen. The editing show him attacking his opponent like a wild animal. The soundtrack only intensifies that feeling by incorporating primal animal noises into the background. Blood gushes from the victims like nothing I’ve ever seen in a boxing movie, or even out of anything besides a good horror movie. All of this is compared with Jake’s odd home life. He’s impotent socially, emotionally, and physically, and he takes all of that rage out on his wife and especially in the ring. Because he can’t satisfy his wife he becomes extremely paranoid that she’s sleeping around on him. An excellent film. I liked this one a lot.

(A)

——JFK——

Jebus. If I was considered paranoid before, I’m twenty times that now. I think this is probably the tightest of Oliver Stone’s movies. Even though this film is way over three hours long, I was riveted to the screen the entire time. If half of the shit this movie claims is true is true then the government has a whole lot of explaining to do. I mean, there is a whole lot of amazing stuff going on here. Each piece of evidence is pealed away like a layer of an onion, and right when you feel like all the information that has spilled out is overloading you the entire thing is summed up in the end so well that you see the onion and more than the onion all at the same time. This script must have been like 500 pages long. The entire movie is wall to wall talking. This kind of overwhelmed my sister who isn’t as familiar with all of the historical background, but for me this was total gravy. I really liked this one.

(A-)

I just found out what the Merovingian was in history.

There was a sect of thought in Medieval France that thought Jesus had sex with Mary Magdalane, after which she got pregnant. She then got in a boat covered with images of the Holy Grail (and perhaps also the actual Grail, I’m not sure, although that is probably the case in all of the Grail myths) after the Crucifixion of Christ and set sail for France. Her children then became known as the royal Merovingian line.

What does all this mean in the Matrix universe? Well, the Merovingian speaks French, is an important almost royal figure, and his table kind of looks like the one from the Last Supper, with Grail like chalices all over the table (I always wondered why they were always in some of the shots). Also, the Merovingian holds the salvation of mankind, the Keymaker, in his basement, and (as we learn at the end of Reloaded) there have been a line of “Ones” (aka Super Jesus’s) that have stolen the Keymaker from the Merovingian, only to help the machines restart the Matrix. Neo is from a long line of Ones that always have to go to the Merovingian who holds their salvation.

[Another interesting connection: Monica Belluci, who plays the Merovingian’s wife Persephone, also is playing Mary Magdalane in Mel Gibson’s upcoming Passion movie.]

I wonder if the Merovingian will have a part in the next film? For instance, Magdalane was considered the true Holy Grail because she was filled with the true blood of Christ. The Merovingian line then were the blood to her Grail. Perhaps the Merovingian holds the true key to Neo’s salvation. We’ll see. Only a couple more months to go.

Night of the Living Dead (1968) vs. Night of the Living Dead (1990)

Back in 1968 a movie of unspeakable terror came out that helped change the face of horror movies. While this movie is no Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later or Dead Alive, without this film there would be none of the others. A lot of the movie is pretty crappy (which I’ll get to) but what really matters is the vision of George Romero, which stays with you much longer than the crappy acting does.

The story is classic horror. A woman goes to the cemetery with her brother to pay their respects to a dead parent, to which the brother greatly resents having to drive so out of his way to do so. He then starts teasing her (“They’re coming to get you Barbara!”) when one of the walking dead comes up and attacks them. They are coming for her! The brother dies, but Barbara gets away to an abandoned house where she becomes trapped with a bunch of different people with different ideas on how to handle the zombies. Cue social commentary…here.

What’s great about this movie is that it isn’t really about zombies, per se, but about crisis management. (This movie would be great to screen for businesses to show what can really go wrong when you panic and don’t work together as a team.) Barbara goes loony. Ben (the black guy) tries to take charge and handle the situation correctly, but he has to deal with the batty Barbara and the extremely annoying Cooper who feels their best bet is staying in the cellar, and ONLY in the cellar. Then you got the willing to help, and yet extremely dumb, teenager, his hysterical girlfriend, Cooper’s “I’ve had it up to here with you!” wife, and their daughter, who has been bitten by one of the zombies. They do an alright job boarding up the house, but when it comes to making an escape attempt everything goes to shit. That’s when the dying starts.

This great idea coupled with Romero’s excellent directing are what makes this movie great. Black and white is used extremely well, with both the film stock and the race relations. One of the things that made this movie really revolutionary when it came out was the fact that not only was the black guy the hero, but he was also the only one with a brain on his shoulders. The actor who plays Ben is also the best of the bunch, which gets me to the problems of this movie.

A couple of the actors are really bad. Barbara, for instance, you want to die almost immediately. She’s so annoying. You want someone to just slap her and say, “Get a hold of yourself, bitch!” Ben does slap her, but it doesn’t do any good. Everyone else (other than Ben and the delightfully bitchy Cooper’s wife) is pretty bad, which distracts you from the good movie they are in. Unfortunately, the good that the movie does in making the black man the hero, is lost when you see what little it does for the women in the movie. For the most part they are extremely weak and submissive to the feuding males, with the sole exception of a few snide remarks that don’t really go anywhere from Cooper’s wife. Otherwise your main female protagonist is Barbara, who spends most of the movie in shock not saying anything unless it is something crazy.

Also the score is way over the top, making the film feel like a cheesy 50’s drive in horror movie, when the movie was actually made in the late 60’s. There are also some silly script mistakes that probably could have been cleared up if this wasn’t the low budget first movie it is. Otherwise it is pretty great, and I give it a B.

Romero somewhere along the line lost the rights to Night of the Living Dead and therefore has made next to no royalties from the movie. Just like when It’s a Wonderful Life used to be on every channel all year long, different versions of Night are everywhere. Just check out Night of the Living Dead on Amazon.com and you’ll come up with like, 11 different DVDs. Because of that you probably won’t notice that one of those DVDs is of the 1990 remake version of the film. I think most people other than the hardcore zombie movie fans don’t even know about this version. I didn’t know about it until I saw it on some zombie movie webpage.

In order to make some money off of the Night of the Living Dead name, Romero decided to update his original script and let Tom Savini (of the Friday the 13th movies) direct his first feature so that he could finally see some royalty money coming in. It’s unfortunate that he didn’t put any more time and effort into it than that, because if handled right the remake could have been one of the greatest zombie movies ever made. Is it is, the remake is only so-so.

What’s better? The script, for one, is more detailed, makes more sense, and makes some interesting changes to the original movie. This time around Barbara isn’t shell-shocked (thank God) and becomes the kick ass protagonist that Ben was in the first movie (although it is still debatable as to whether or not watching her brother die did still make her crazy). Ben’s character is subtly changed so that he is now just as bad as Cooper, even though appearing at first to be the same rational guy he was in the first movie. His temper flares up a little more and he’s a little more bossy, which helps explain his fate in the biggest change of the movie, the new more dramatic ending (although the first movie still packs more of a punch). I won’t ruin that for you here though.

The makeup is also much better. These zombies actually look dead, unlike in the original where they just looked like people walking funny. There are lots of great zombies where you can tell exactly how they died, which I always think is a pretty good deal.

Where does the movie go wrong? Well, the acting still sucks for the most part. The music is worse than in the original because it’s all midi orchestra, which sounds like ass. And the greatest strength of the original, the visionary direction, is probably the biggest weakness of the remake, since Savini isn’t a very good director, and the fact that it is now in color (with way too much lighting) keeps any creepy atmospheric stuff from entering the picture. This places way too much of the weight of the picture on the writing, which is good but can’t hold up the rest. The end of the world dread is also missing, unfortunately.

I’m not really sure why they didn’t try for a big studio release for this movie. The budget could have been bigger, they could have gotten more talented people on board, and since the script is so good and because of the classic status of the original I don’t think it would have flopped at all. Instead it just feels like they were trying to make a quick buck with this one (or any money at all, in the case of Romero). It’s still good, but it could have been a lot better. I give this one a B-.

The idea that one could create an utopia is pure rubbish.

Let me explain why: An utopia society can only be created by making a code of laws and behavior that separate it and make it “better” than all other societies. This code must be followed by everyone in order for the utopia to be successful and the code must be strict on what is acceptable for the utopia and what is considered part of non-utopia society.

This is where the problem lies. Since the utopia has to be so strict about what makes it what it is, it ceases to be able to change. This lack of change means that it will always be the same while societies outside of it evolve with new discoveries and altered views on behavoir. It will not take long before the utopia society becomes old, weak and obsolete. The very thing that originally made it strong will become its greatest weakness. Without being able to alter or expand itself with changing times, the utopia will soon fall to other freer, more advanced societies. Therefore there can be no true utopian societies.

Sony has been making hurried efforts to cut its losses from Gigli, pulling midweek ads from newspapers and asking TV stations and networks to substitute spots for Bad Boys II in place of those for the Jennifer Lopez-Ben Affleck bomb, the New York Daily News reported today (Monday). “They’re making every effort to pull advertising,” a network exec told the newspaper.

…

In the immortal words of Nelson from the Simpsons, “Ha, ha!”

For the longest time I couldn’t move files from my old computer to my new one because I couldn’t find the software for my External ZipDrive. You can try to copy the files onto a disk and then move them, which is a slow process that doesn’t work. Other than that, you’re fucked.

That’s what I thought until I talked to my uncle Tim last week. He told me that you can download the drivers you need right off of the Iomega website. Yesterday I went there, and sure enough everything you need is right there for the taking. So I downloaded that yesterday and today I started the long task of moving files from one computer to the other.

Of course–I’m not going to lie to you–most of those files were porn and Kylie Minogue music videos. Throw in some MP3s and that was my day, folks. Why I felt the need to transfer a GIG of porn off of one hard drive onto the other, instead of just deleting it all, I’ll never know. Perhaps just for the joy of saying, “Yes, I’ve seen a pig fuck a woman, and I can show you what it looks like right here.” (Note: Before you get all creeped out, very little of my porn is actually that weird.)

One odd thing about the Zipdrive. Either it won’t spit out your Zip disk when you ask it to, leading to much frustration and yelling, or it pops out the disk with the velocity of a bullet leaving the barrel of a gun. The thing seriously scares me.

Zipdrives man, zipdrives…