Month: April 2007

With each additional $80 billion "emergency supplemental appropriation" and with the coveted half-trillion dollar mark in sight, the chants of "I think I can! I think I can!" get louder.

Do. Not. Go. See. Grindhouse. If you saw it and enjoyed it, let this sentence serve as warning that you may want to skip this entire entry.

I like Mr. Tarantino. Really. I own all of his movies on DVD, even the one I hated (Kill Bill Vol. 1). But he has unfortunately become the Oprah Book Club for hipsters. That is, attach his name to anything – no matter how obviously ridiculous or awful it looks – and mindless hordes of people in really tight jeans and Walkmen t-shirts will flock to see it like lemmings.

Seeing the previews for Grindhouse, I was struck by several things. I am a person who tends to trust my own eyes more than reviews, recommendations, etc. – and this movie simply looked awful. Second, it was patently obvious that without the hype and Tarantino's name, it would have been ticketed for a straight-to-cable release. It didn't even look good enough to merit straight-to-video. USA Network or TNT quality at best. Third, assuming that everything about the film was identical except for the name(s) of the director(s), there is no way in hell that you would even consider shelling out $9 to see it let alone actually do so.

In short, everything about it screamed "complete piece of shit, cleverly marketed."

So why did I see it? Believe me, I strenuously objected, but A) Liz really wanted to (we are now officially fighting as a result) and B) about 25 of my friends in Bloomington were going out to help cheer up a friend who was very excited about it and just had his relationship go "poof". So for Liz and said friend, I bit the bullet.

It is the biggest mistake I have made in quite some time.

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This film is, on so many levels, the worst I have ever seen. I am a man who adores bad movies (i.e., You Got Served, Battlefield:Earth) but only when they are unintentionally bad without irony. This did not fit the bill.

The very definition of "satire" implies that the object is somehow being tweaked in violation of social convention – satirizing those in power, the wealthy, the esteemed, or the otherwise socially elevated. So mocking the horror genre is, well, not really satire at all. It's just a combination of beating a dead horse and pointing out the fucking obvious. As such, I was prepared for the Robert Rodriguez portion of this film to be excruciating. Boy, what a visionary it must take to make fun of how bad horror movies are! The film was essentially 90 minutes of wink-wink-nudge-nudge-isn't it funny/clever how bad all of this is?

No, it isn't. If I wanted to see awful dialogue, ridiculous plots, gratuitious nudity/violence, and spurting fake blood everywhere I could just watch an actual horror film. Doing the exact same thing but adding a lot of faux-postmodern "it's somehow intellectually superior if we wink a lot and acknowledge how bad this all is while we're doing it" doesn't really add to the experience. It just makes a generally awful one – watching horror films – a lot more pretentious. As if it's somehow "better" because we're all good, jaded Gen-X liberal pseudo-intellectuals while we're watching it.

Strip all of that away and you're left with the typical shitty, gratuitous slasher movie aimed at the intelligence level of the average 12 year old boy.

"But Ed" you say, "didn't it get better once the Tarantino-directed portion rolled around?" I sure as hell hoped so. I was wrong.

Let me summarize: this was completely phoned-in filler.
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Start with 30 minutes of absolutely pointless character-development of people who were just going to get killed anyway, add in 20 minutes of horrendous dialogue as the main characters sat around a diner table (stop me if you've seen this before – I'm pretty sure it was just all the scraps that ended up on the cutting room floor from his other films, especially Reservoir Dogs), and cap it off with a 30-minute car chase. The end result? An hour-plus film that should have been about 15 minutes long. It was stupid, rambling, anticlimactic, and (in terms of script and dialogue) essentially like watching Tarantino masturbate for an hour.

In short, fuck this film, fuck everyone stupid enough to fall for its hype and its bald-faced efforts at stroking hipster egos, and fuck its nearly four hour run time. "But Ed, I found it funny / it was humorous in the fact that it was completely over-the-top." Maybe so, but all horror movies are gratuitious in their violence and inherently funny/stupid/ridiculous in how over-the-top they are. So the next time I'm in the mood for that (i.e., never) I'll simply rent Texas Chainsaw Massacre or something similar and spare myself the pretentious hipster wank-fest and all the "we're so much better than this awful shit that when we do it, it ceases to be awful shit and becomes art and/or brilliant social commentary on how awful said shit is" baggage.

I hated this film like few others. Everyone involved with it should die of AIDS. In closing, fuck you.

Since approximately 1964 it has been exceptionally depressing to be a Democrat in this country. The "successes" interspersed among a nearly-unbroken string of awful candidates, sad excuses for leaders, and dismal failures have been Jimmy Carter (!!!) and Bill "I accomplished more of Reagan's agenda than Reagan did" Clinton. And it's just as clear looking ahead to 2008 that this is not exactly the year that will turn things around. I will not belabor the point by re-hashing all of the hand-wringing you have already heard about how once again the Democrats are trying to choose among a pool of horrid potential nominees (HRC, John "Stench of Losing" Edwards, Al Gore, Barack "I've been in the Senate for 5 minutes" Obama, and a host of no-names).

Let's cheer ourselves up by taking a few minutes to point out the equally-obvious (but much more rarely-stated): 2008 promises to be the worst GOP field since the "Who wants to donate their body to run against FDR?" 1940s. In my mind, only 1996 can even come close in terms of offering up a slate of turkeys like this. I mean, as weak as the Democratic field is, the front-runners and eventual winners are relatively easy to identify (Clinton vs. Obama, with Edwards poised to make a run when one of them falters). Who is the Republican front-runner at the moment?

*crickets*

Yeah, I thought so. In such a vacuum, it should be whoever appeals best to the party base (i.e., James Dobson) has the best odds. But we can't even say who that is at the moment. Who is the Religious Right excited about?

Savor this rare moment – Ed is speechless.

As Bill Hicks once said, Keith went over the edge years ago only to find that there was a ledge over the edge.

I never particularly liked (or disliked) John McCain, but his Presidential ambitions are turning into a sad, unintentional comedy in multiple acts. His bizarre, possibly drug-fueled assertion this weekend that Baghdad's streets are safe (after he and several Republican Senators strolled an open market under heavily military escort and in Kevlar vests) are to McCain what "The Scream" was to Howard Dean. It's over, and all subsequent efforts on McCain's part are simply going to look pathetic.

In short, the "Baghdad is Safe" speech is officially the point at which McCain 2008 Jumped the Shark (in case you've been living under a rock….here)

McCain visits the Bloomington Farmer's Market on Saturday

This man went to Iraq and, under the protective cover of 100 Army Rangers, two Apache gunships, 6 armored vehicles, and three Blackhawk helicopters, declared that Baghdad is a safe place to walk around (Congressman Mike Pence of Indiana described it as "like a normal outdoor market in Indiana"). Like all of the other war cheerleaders, he's simply desperate and flailing at this point. Like his Dear Leader, everything McCain says about Iraq sounds like hysterical ranting these days. He might as well just stand in front of the camera and scream, tears welling in his eyes, "It IS getting better! It IS! Why won't you fuckers report how WELL things are going? I HATE you. I hate ALL of you!"

Oh wait – that's basically what he just did.

John McCain showed his true colors 4 years ago when he decided to become an Offical War Cheerleader, but even I am starting to feel a little bit sorry for him given what a living, breathing joke this once-proud man has become. The punchline? Half an hour after the Senators held their condescending, media-scolding press conference, 6 mortars fell on the market and six US soldiers were killed by roadside IEDs. I think they died of irony.