Category Archives: Film

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Those ancient dudes have some good stuff to say

Tis the season to think about the deeper things in life. No, it’s not election time, or random-mandated-corporation-gift-giving-occasion, or even your birthday. Or maybe it is your birthday, in which case, happy birthday, you’re one year closer to the joys of the drink.

But even considering the date, I think it’s generally good to ponder your place in the world. At least a little. I mean you don’t have to get wrapped around it to the point that you end up hiding under some coats in a dark closet, giggling. But it’s still something to contemplate. Particularly since tomorrow you could cash-out in a horrific maritime accident.

By the way, I imagine statistically speaking that you’re now about six-hundred times more likely to die at sea as you are in the air. So take it from a guy who used to do that for a living. When you’re on something that floats you should:

a) Always be wearing a lifejacket or at all times know where the closest one is

b) Always know where the nearest exit is to reach daylight and how to get there, in the pitch dark, or with your eyes closed

c) Make sure those you are with know these things too, challenge each other, ask questions, and have a plan

d) If you find (a) through (c) too tedious, don’t go to sea, even for a ride

Anyways, so I’ve been reading a lot lately. I go in spurts. Sometimes I read nothing. Other times I’m a total loser (that is, more than usual) locked up in my hovel with my dogs, a book, and beer. So I came upon a good passage the other day from a real classic.

So there’s this Xerxes guy. He’s on his way to conquer the world because it’s there. He’s real good at it. So were his father and their ancestors. He’s crossing continents and has a few things to say.

Oh man, how much better is this actual text than the verbal mess of an exchange we saw between Rodrigo Santoro and Eva Green in 300? As they yack it up next to the bridges like actors trapped in a historical (not historical) movie.

Now don’t get me wrong. I had a good time with 300 Round Two, but the original was much better. And also closer to the truth of what occurred. I’ve got a lot to say about these two flicks, which will probably come in a later post, I guess. Maybe?

But friends, generally truth isn’t just stranger than fiction, it’s also better:

When he saw the whole Hellespont covered with ships, and all the shores and plains of Abydos full of men, Xerxes first declared himself blessed, and then wept.

Artabanos perceived this, he who in the beginning had spoken his mind freely and advised Xerxes not to march against Hellas. Marking how Xerxes wept, he questioned him and said, “O king, what a distance there is between what you are doing now and a little while ago! After declaring yourself blessed you weep.”

Xerxes said, “I was moved to compassion when I considered the shortness of all human life, since of all this multitude of men not one will be alive a hundred years from now.”

Artabanos answered, “In one life we have deeper sorrows to bear than that. Short as our lives are, there is no human being either here or elsewhere so fortunate that it will not occur to him, often and not just once, to wish himself dead rather than alive. Misfortunes fall upon us and sicknesses trouble us, so that they make life, though short, seem long.

Life is so miserable a thing that death has become the most desirable refuge for humans; the god is found to be envious in this, giving us only a taste of the sweetness of living.”

So Xerxes has everything a human could ever ask for in women, riches, power, women, and prestige. The only thing he lacks in life is heavy infantry. Which unfortunately for him, becomes a real problem a few months later. But he’s still having trouble figuring out how to play in this shitty-cruel-bitch of a life that we all lead. So what does that tell you? If this guy has it all, and can’t always get it done, then don’t be too hard on yourself. Just try and enjoy the ride.

Now you may be tempted to respond to my nonsense by throwing up your hands and screaming: “This is bullshit!” Or, “Fuck you, who cares?” Or, “Wait, what is this shit, why am I here wasting my time reading this?!” And thus your solution is to never read this blog again (a smart idea) or to become a mindless bank robbing asshole. Because, you know, why not? The bank’s not going to rob itself. And if life is shit, you might as well roll the dice, right? But the problem with that line of thinking is bank robbery is less worth it nowadays. I think you have an 85% change of getting caught and your average take is like $7K or something. That’s not even enough to buy one-third of your average family car.

So what then? Panic? Burn the world? Melt your mind with chemicals? Well, how about this, I read this a few days back too:

Wash, make yourselves clean. Take your wrong-doing out of sight. Cease doing evil.

Learn to do good, search for justice, discipline the violent, be just to the orphan, plead for the widow.

Sounds good enough to me. Let’s go with that.

Enjoy it while you can. Try your best. It’s a hell of a hard ride, but remember how lucky we all are that we’re here at all. And do your best to earn it.

300-Rise-of-an-Empire-Hellespont-bridge-HR

Oh my. I’m so fucking awesome. Gaze upon my eighth wonder of the world. But shit, what I wouldn’t pay for just five thousand armored infantry. Anybody got a phone? I’ve got to make some calls. Fuck.

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You may not know it, but it’s all irrelevant

Guess who died last night? No, not some poor Ukrainian beat cop. That’s not important. Who cares about that guy anyways? One of the critical characters from Game of Thrones! No, I didn’t see the episode, but you can’t miss the result on most news websites today. I’m sure there’s not anything going on in the real world, so let’s make sure we spend Monday morning in fantasy land.

I’m calling the ending to Game of Thrones right now. They all die. No, that’s not a spoiler, I have no idea what happens. I’ve never and will never read the books. But I know how it ends. They all die. Hey, you ever see The Walking Dead? I know how it ends! They all die. Even if some of them actually live, what’s the point? They’ll all be so burned out from their death caravan that they’d be comfortable calling a serial killer their beer buddy.

Here’s a little advice for those chronic viewers fascinated or upset by all these people dying. Don’t mourn them, they aren’t real television characters, they’re just cardboard cutouts that you can ignore. What happens to them is irrelevant. But wait, you say, Game of Thrones has characters, it’s just the drama at work that takes them to the next life! If you never know when a character might die, it keeps you on the edge of a real true story! Well no, what it does is mentally separate you from the outcome because you have no emotional investment in a character.

Whether you realize it’s happening or not, when you watch Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead or Generic Meat Grinder Television Show #43a7.5b your mind mentally removes you from the story because what’s the point when they’re all walking skeletons.

So what are you actually watching in Game of Thrones? A decent plot and a spectacle of death. Now Game of Thrones seems to have a pretty detailed plot. I watched the first two seasons and it had some really great moments. The story can entertain, it’s really well made, and the actors are truly gifted. So why did I stop watching? Because I’m finished with the meat grinder.

I have no idea why the creators of Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead feel compelled to output this level of misery. Maybe they just need a woman? I’m sure a whole bunch of people who deem themselves smarter than I are going to quote art concepts, enhanced storytelling, whatever. Honestly, I think what these shows ultimately amount to is pornography. You think you’re watching a great story. What you’re actually watching is a moderately good plot, filled with death, flagrant nudity, and other base human desires.

You consider you’re observing true art with hints of philosophy, an updated take on drama, and a plot so detailed that only your elite mind can understand it. People who don’t watch just aren’t as smart as you. Well, I submit you’ve been had. What they’ve spoon fed you is a story that appeals not to your higher intellect, but your most carnal and basic nature. You might as well grab all your boyfriends and girlfriends, head off to the Coliseum for some brutality, and then cool off with a vicious orgy.

This is why so many dramas are now based not on good guys, but on truly horrible human beings. The Walking Dead is populated with murderers, slavers, and so on. Breaking Bad was all about one guy’s descent into pure evil. Again, you think what you’re getting is a contemporary drama that shows morals, society, and our values as they truly are. But what you’re really receiving is a window into your most primal nature, where morals, good people, and striving for a better tomorrow do not exist. It’s cave entertainment reborn.

Oh, and don’t tell me this is fresh drama that replaces decades of film and movies that were too stale, establishment focused, and generally not gritty. If you think old movies were hokey and lacked the true gravel of hard drama, then you haven’t seen old movies and television.

Go watch The Searchers and come to me and claim it’s lightweight and cheery. I’ll respond that you were high, I mean more than usual. That movie’s hero is a criminal, who allows men to commit suicide, nearly becomes a child murderer, and is generally just as nasty a person as anybody in Game of Thrones.

What separates this real character from say The Walking Dead are two things. He has a story to accompany his brutal nature and he has some manner of redemption. He has an arc, a journey of discovery. It’s a voyage we share with him as the audience. At the end of The Searchers, Wayne’s character finds some kind of inner peace. He doesn’t get the girl, he isn’t happy, but he leaves the movie a better person than when he started.

If they remade The Searchers into entertainment today he’d kill people about every ten minutes and then get beheaded horribly about halfway through the story. All without ever learning anything about himself or life in general. There’s something liberating about the dark journey of The Searchers.

There’s nothing redeeming about Game of Thrones. We have a different term we apply to entertainment where people are mercilessly killed with no purpose and almost no compensatory value. They’re called horror movies.

Now this might sound like an odd rant for a guy who’s usually far more cheery than your average kid in a candy store. But I guess that’s my point. If I want to beat myself with a wire brush, I can just watch the news. When I observe entertainment, I want to learn something, and I want to have fun. Folks can die, some characters can go through it without learning anything, bad guys are always needed, but without any redeeming quality at all? I’d rather just watch sports.

The only thing I find positive about this issue is there is some light here. Despite the obsession with Game of Thrones from the elite media, it draws only a little over five million viewers a night. This doesn’t even place it in the top ten, not even close. But from the news you read this morning you’d think it was the most popular show by a long shot.

This tells me two things. One, the general public also does not prefer the meat grinder either. Two, you can learn an awful lot about the media, and the message they want to send to you the viewer, when their number one preferred shows are all horror stories. These people are the ones who write your daily news. If this is what they call good entertainment, it’s probably something that should give you pause the next time they gleefully inform you that it’s they that you should listen to in order to learn about the globe and life in general.

Game-of-Thrones8

Glorified B Horror Movie Hacks

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Ignoring history has become too common

Everybody hates history.  It’s boring, most people who teach it are weird, it has almost no practical value toward our daily lives, and if you believe all of these things you’re in the majority.  That doesn’t mean you’re right.  Ignorance of history is also a poison to a culture.

In my opinion, one of the major common themes of a destroyed civilization is the absence of any understand of its history.  Do you think the drunk, rich assholes in Rome had any idea how hard it was to build their Empire right before Attila instructed them on the ways of the universe?

I could write ten pages on this topic, but I’m here today to raise one point that recently came to mind.  Twelve Years a Slave has won the Oscar for best picture.  They say it’s pretty good.  I haven’t seen it, but maybe I will later.  Perhaps just because it’s the elite thing to see it, I refuse to.

What really irks me is one of the greatest compliments people (idiots) hoist upon the movie’s shoulders is how it (my summary) exposes the rotten, intrinsically evil, founding principles of America.  I have no idea if this is what the movie’s creators intended, usually the audience can interpret whatever they want, but it’s what a lot of individuals are saying.  Folks who have no conception of their own history are happy to clap for a movie that informs them their heritage came from Satan.  Wow, that really makes me want to see the movie and enjoy it.

It’s easy to hate what you don’t understand.  The country was certainly founded with a great evil in slavery.  But the Founding Fathers knew this.  Just read Adams, Washington, Jefferson, and you quickly learn they all were well aware of what they were doing.  If you’ve learned anything on this blog it’s that life is a cruel bitch.  You do the best you can.  They made mistakes, and they certainly also made compromises.  In the end, they still created a very beautiful thing.  Maybe if your ancestors were under the whip you don’t see it that way, but I hope you at least understand where I’m coming from.  As I certainly understand where you’re coming from.

What bothers me the most in this conversation is that there was also a cleansing act in history that people ignore.  It’s called the American Civil War.  The Founding Fathers left this very stark issue for their grandchildren to address.  When people bring up the movie, they forget to mention that just a few years after the events of the movie took place, the country blew up.  If slavery was our founding sin, we paid for it in righteous blood.  One out of every thirty Americans died in this war.  The equivalent number in today’s population is ten million people.  It didn’t necessarily end there, just ask MLK’s ghost, but it was a start.

Two of my ancestors shed their blood on the battlefield to free the slaves and preserve America.  Don’t tell me we’re founded and sustained upon sin.  We’re human, we’ve made horrible mistakes.  But we’ve made up for them with great, virtuous acts.  We have a long way to go, but that’s history’s context too.  Compared to losing ten million on the battlefield, I assure you, we can make it all so much better together, hand-in-hand.  But we’re not going to get there listening to people who are stuck in the past, when they don’t understand the past.

So do me a favor you elite assholes.  The next time you mention how rotten we all are, at least be willing to tell me you’ve heard of Antietam or Cold Harbor or Fort Wagner or Chickamauga.  If you don’t know what they are?  Then I have no interest in what you have to say about our history.

dayattheoffice

You cannot fathom, my fellow Americans, of how awful it really was.

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Film in the Middle East – Banning Noah

Many people focused today on pivotal issues such as a missing airplane, invasion plans, and whether $12 million on one man is enough to buy your way out of Super Bowl shame.  I on the other hand spent my day figuring out the greatest mystery since King Tutankhamun’s tomb:

Why are several Gulf states banning the masterpiece hit film Noah?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-26568107

To get to the bottom of this crisis I commuted today to Doha via an Arcturan Teledar sortie.  There I spoke with Professor Ali Hassan bin Angry of the Doha Institute for Offended Studies.

The Arcturus Project:  Professor Hassan, thanks so much for agreeing to speak with us.

Professor Hassan:  My pleasure, Sir.

TAP:  Why so quick to ban a film you haven’t even seen?

PH:  Well, it’s not necessarily the content of the film, but as we understand it Nūh is depicted directly in the film…

TAP:  Yes, I saw Russell Crowe’s dreamy face in the previews.

PH:  Exactly, and in Islam we consider it blasphemy to show the face of a prophet, any prophet.

TAP:  And so the ban.

PH:  Yes, of course.

TAP:  Why did you not just ask Paramount to blur Crowe’s face throughout the film?  It might have actually improved the viewing experience.

PH:  Ah, I suppose we never considered it.  It’s just blasphemous.

TAP:  Do you hope all nations with Islamic populations will ban the flick?

PH:  Of course, it’s sacrilege and offensive to our values.

TAP:  You do realize they don’t actually intend to offend you, they just want to make a shit ton of cash.

PH:  Pardon?

TAP:  They’ve managed to offend nearly every religion on the planet by making this film.  I think even a Buddhist monk wants to vomit somewhere, but they don’t want to offend people because if they offend somebody they can’t take their cash.

PH:  But they had to have seen this coming?

TAP:  I think they just figured they’d take the risk.  They have to cash in on the name.

PH:  I don’t understand?

TAP:  Everybody on the planet knows Noah’s name.  So if they make a movie about him, people will in theory hand over cash because of name recognition.  This movie isn’t about religion, it’s about a guy named Noah.  They don’t care about his story.  They just want you in the door because you know his name.  After that, they could have Noah solving bank robberies for all Paramount cares.

PH:  Well, then certainly we’ve made the right choice by banning such a disgusting cash grab!

TAP:  No see, you’re wrong, by banning the movie you’ve undoubtedly ensured millions in the Islamic world will see this via an online hack site or something.  Since you’ve banned it, now they’ll have to see it.

PH:  There’s no way that’s true.

TAP:  It happens all the time.  You think anybody actually wanted to watch Passion of the Christ?  It’s just several hours of a decent guy getting the shit kicked out of him.  But then a bunch of you guys banned it and it got more press.

PH:  That was never our intention though.

TAP:  You need to learn from your mistakes, there’s going to be more films like this.

PH:  More?!  They must have mercy upon us.

TAP:  They won’t, any concept that has anything with a recognizable name is going to get packaged into a shitty film and shoved down your throat.  Religious characters, historical dude, the freaking zoo, anything.  They’ll shove out one with a Rubik’s Cube next year for sure.

PH:  You mean that colored square?

TAP:  Exactly.

PH:  Why would they do such an evil thing?  Why so quickly?

TAP:  They have to get the movie out there before they lose the name recognition.  In ten years nobody will know what a Rubik’s Cube is anymore because it’s not a smartphone application.

PH:  You’ve opened my eyes to a great evil but I find your assertion that the Rubik’s Cube movie is coming as dubious.

TAP:  How do you figure?

PH:  This is insane, what would the Cube do?

TAP:  I don’t know, fight Satan.

PH:  How is a Rubik’s Cube going to fight Satan?

TAP:  With, ah, with its mind.

PH:  …

TAP:  So like the cube will stump Satan because he can’t do math, and then he’ll surrender, and the Cube will walk away with the girl.

PH:  The Dark One’s enslaved the human race with hate and darkness for over five thousand years.  I’m pretty sure he can do complex math!

TAP:  Hey listen buddy, whose interview is this anyways?

PH:  Yes, yes, yours, publish your article!  Let your insanity widely disperse.  I stand by the ban.

TAP:  Article, yeah, so…

PH:  You represent the San Francisco Chronicle!  I agreed to this interview as such!

TAP:  Yeah, they’ve uh, they’ve got me on retainer.  I love Frisco.

PH:   …

TAP:  …

PH:  Do you have a card!?

TAP:  I have an Arcturan enforcer waiting for me outside in the parking lot.  He can’t go home until I do.

PH:  Can he fly me too? 

TAP:  Why?

PH:  I believe I have found an equitable solution to both our problems. 

TAP:  I’m listening.

In a shocking event the home of respected filmmaker Darren Aronofsky was found incinerated this morning.  His fate is unknown as police believe it will take weeks to search for his remains, should they exist inside.  Religious groups worldwide are acclaiming this as “God’s justice” for the “blasphemy” evident in his latest film Noah.  Studios worldwide are said to be considering a rethink of their plans for dozens of films “inspired by actual religions events”.

Now to our next story.  Police are hot on the case of a complaint from a local pirate themed bar of the “loud and disgusting” behavior of a trio of patrons (one dressed in an alien costume) who drank heavily, shouted at staff and other patrons, sang obnoxiously of their ‘victory’, punched a teenage waitress in the face, and rode the pirate mannequin out the door when threated with a police call.  The authorities are said to be investigating. 

NOAH

You know his name.  For the purposes of this film, his story is irrelevant.  Please relinquish your cash in an orderly manner.