stevengharms

Florida Republican representative Bob Allen has been found guilty for soliciting sex in a public ( state park bathroom ) place.

What I found interesting, is his counsel repeated appeals to the fictitious geography known as “Bizarro World” as part of the defence.

During closing arguments earlier in the day, Eisenmenger told jurors the state’s version reminded him of a comic-book land called Bizarro World, “where everything is backward.”

And further….

But in his closing, Whitaker pointed to an enlarged mug shot of Allen’s unshaven face and declared, “This is Bizarro World.” “Bob Allen making eyes at police, looking over a stall door at another man’s eyes, going into that stall … looking at that man and saying, ‘This is kind of a public place, isn’t it?’ That is Bizarro World.”

bizarro world
Originally uploaded by errepece

Is this just not incredibly nutso? It would be like your defence including what happened in an episode of “Friends”. See it was just like that time Joey knew Rachel and Chandler were getting together but everyone thought he was a pervert. But remember, he kept saying “I’m Joey”?

But an appeal to Bizarro world is not unknown in Kryptonian jurisprudence.

Said defence for Zod, Law-El: “It is Bizarro World, General Zod was just arranging fireworks for a celebratory festival for that rapidly-approaching, gaseous star over there!”.

This weekend my Brother in the Sisters of Mercy and his lady invited us to see the latest Wes Anderson movie, The Darjeeling Limited, so duly after a night of masquerading about town, we dragged ourselves up and out to make the midday showing.

I know there are some people in this world who give Wes Anderson an absolute carte blanche, can do no wrong. I think that’s malarky. The man can do wrong, and does so often, but because the films have the earnestness of a thrift store cardigan worn by the ingenue in your freshman English literature survey class but whose number, alas, you never succeeded in getting, he gets away with cinematic sloppiness.

Don’t get me wrong, I thought Rushmore had an energy and a vitality to it that bespoke a fresh and honest new breath into film. Instead it seems that it was the segueway to what’s became an unbearably boring, egotistical, exploration of one’s own kitsch auteur-theory .

Je vous dois: The Darjeeling limited

The movie doesn’t start terribly, the prequel film “Hotel Chevalier” lets you know that there’s something very, very stunted with Mr. Schwartzman’s character. Peter Sartedt’s “Where Do You Go To My Lovely” plays (sounding quite a lot like Leonard Cohen) and Natalie Portman comes for, what appears to be, a trans-atlantic booty call. It’s a bit overdone and feels like someone acting in an amateurish American attempt to capture a sort of Bergman-esque spareness ( I can imagine actor John Cassavetes doing this part oh-so very well ), but serves to establish a bit of interest in the background story of this fellow.

The movie then cuts to “part 2” the movie proper and starts with an anxious Bill Murray riding sans fear, but very, very anxiously in one of the hellbent for Mach 2 Indian taxis that avoids pedicabs, motocabs, and a cow as Bill rushes to catch the train that shares the same name with the film. As Bill’s businessman runs to catch the train, he is passed by Adrien Brody who manages to catch the train with a self-satisfied exhaustion that continues to build the intrigue.

Regrettably, there it ends. Little did I know it, but Bill’s out-of-breath businessman stranded was the perfect visual metaphor for the rest of the film: it was already out of breath. From this point on it’s a series of discursive and, well, whiny, pleas by boy-men who can’t figure out what they’re supposed to do with their lives. Owen Wilson plays the third brother who arranged for the brothers to take a trip on this train as a togetherness exercise a year after their father’s funeral.

Change the train to an RV, add antics and Robin Williams, and you could have called it “RV”.

Blarf.

The characters do absolutely nothing interesting and every plot turn or character quirk is telegraphed, no, put on a great big Amber Alert board, 20 minutes ahead of the reveal. Any subtlety is foregone as they try to deal with the unresolved baggage thrust upon them by their father’s sudden death and their mother’s disappearance. And yes, there’s a reference to the end in that paragraph. I don’t feel the need to *Spoiler* it because it’s entirely obvious.

It was, a yawner.

It wouldn’t have been quite so insufferable had not this exact same territory been explored by Anderson himself in The Royal Tenenbaums but only 6 years ago. He’s returned to the topic with absolutely nothing to add to the topic.

I saw a quote at rottentomatoes that at a point in his career where he should be moving forward he’s going backwards. Yes. So right. It’s time for Anderson and his characters to bravely go to that world of people older than 30 who manage to pay their utility bill on time, and manage not to dwell in shadows of how it was easier when you had parents who did things for you and re-assured you that you had made the right decisions.

Here’s a growth opportunity for Anderson. Try writing a movie where the characters have real jobs versus limitless wealth which affords them the chance to lounge about pondering stupid bullshit questions and fetishizing stupid pop culture bullshit. I mean seriously, when was the last time a character in an Anderson movie had a job you saw them actually do ( and I don’t mean underwater explorer ). Last I can think of? Rushmore. Max and his dad were barbers.

So The League informed the world of the availability of the Iron Man trailer. I must say Downey looks like he’s caught the disaffected playboy / Bush-era military-industrial-complex profiteer turns warrior for good ( but with a hint of misanthrope ) lightning in a jar in a way which is not “just the character formula of Batman” yet again.

He can do that because he’s an excellent real actor. See counter-example:

But the thing I’d like to lens in on is the use of Black Sabbath’s Ur-Metal song, uh, “Iron Man”. “Iron Man” is the Epic of Gilgamesh of Heavy Metal. Like the waters of Enki, it’s the source from which all that is meht-haaaaal comes.

[ Death says: “Mehtal rules!” ]

In any case, assuming you have some level of pop culture knowledge and a “The Arrow” formatted radio station somewhere in your experience, when you hear Tony Iommi’s pick-up bending, bridge-buckling, whammy-bar distorted opening air-raid dive-bomb opening of “Iron Man” you get the “Aw shits”.

“Aw shit, it’s “Iron Man” by ür-metal band Black Sabbath in the trailer for “Iron Man” - bet the studio paid through the nose to use that one! But it’s so cool!”

Great moments are achieved by subtlety not by the TOTAL RUINATION OF THE AD BY INCLUDING THE OPENING DISTORTED VOICE EFFECT “I AM IRON MAN” FROM BLACK SABBATH’S “IRON MAN” SONG AS THE MOVIE TITLE IRON MAN IS PRINTED IN A BLADE OF IRON

Wait did you miss it? He’s IRON MAN.

Stupid hacks always butcher good things.

Read more to find out how I would have cut the trailer.

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Last night Lauren and I, sick of being sick and trapped in the house, went out to Austin’s Paramount Theatre and saw the 9 o’clock showing of “Bombshell”.

The synopsis runs essentially like this: “Bombshell” film actress Lola Burns, a from the farm in Illinois to Hollywood starlet type who fickly hops from idea to idea: Marrying the tanned European marquis, adopting a baby, changing her Hollywood image. Naturally the studio’s publicity man and the studio head are none-too-keen on their bombshell becoming “a rubber nipple” and are thus dedicated to thwarting her ambitions and making sure she’s back for her make-up call.

Notably, this movie was pre-Code, so instead of smarmy pratfalls and fades to black, you get characters’ adult dialog being actually fit for adults ( implication of single motherhood, racy dialogue about underclothing, displays of drunkenness, etc. ).

It was stunning to both Lauren and I how different the expectations of movie viewers have become. These characters had absolutely no depth there was no empathy that I could have had for any of the characters. Rather, I thought this “talkie” to basically be like watching flesh-animated cartoons.

• “Oh look Daffy’s doing blackface (now considered racist) stuff!”

• “Oh look, they’re going to put the goldfish in the water pitcher!”

It was as if the idea of the character having a mental world wherewith the viewer could empathize, relate, or see their thought process was completely un-considered, like a cartoon.

Somewhat appallingly to the modern viewer, as the Lola’s character attempted to control her public image ( instead of being a slut, being a virgin, because that’s the only two choices a lady has, mind you ) and not be quite such a tool of the studio, the direction seems to prod you to the conclusion: “That silly platinum blonde dame, she lacks the gumption to stick to anything of import anyway, all the better the studio kept her from trying that!”

The subtext was very surprising to both of us.

Nevertheless, the pure absurdity, and that incredibly loud ( to add to the chaos ) soundtrack combined with the comedy of errors/manners/impaired mental function do bring together some absurd and farcical laughs ( especially when Lola is romanced by a Bostonian blue-blood whose spare time is occupied by writing “verse” )

Interestingly, the studio publicist, Lee Tracy had this tidbit of information at the imdb:

While in Mexico for location shooting for VIVA VILLA!, Tracy stepped out onto his hotel balcony and urinated on a passing military parade. He was immediately arrested and deported from the country. Embarrassed & furious, Louis B. Mayer fired him instantly from MGM.

Now that would be a turn in a biopic that I’ve not seen before.

Two Christmas seasons ago that mindless namby-pamby drivel known as Narnia assaulted my eye-sockets in San José. The only blessed moment of that two hours of tooth scraping was when a certain screenwriting lawyer-friend of mine abruptly turned and “Ssshhh!’d” a chatty 12 year old behind him.

…CGI lion comes on screen and mutters something… Kid: It’s Qui-Gonn! Lawyer-Friend: ¡¡¡Shh!!!!!

This Christmas, the gorgeous Golden Compass is coming to theaters near you and it’s envisioned the world of His Dark Materials in a lush, dream-filtered, techno-steampunk richness. The plot is compleling and the charaters rich. It’s sort of what Narnia would have been, had it been written by Richard Dawkins.

The casting looks great:

Nicole Kidman playing the fundamentalist Mrs. Coulter equal parts seductive and adamant, like fundamentalism and ignorance themselves

Or Daniel Craig as the Byronic and mercurial Lord Asriel

I think it will be a winner.

And I, for one, am excited to see computer effects bring to life the Nordic-named, heroic, armor-wearing polar bear named Iorek Byrnison.

Man, attending SXSW was really brutal this morning thanks to the enforced and early daylight savings time change. We woke up pretty foul and pretty tired. Last night we had attended one happy hour and had then headed down South Congress to Southside Pizza.

It was a wonderful meal and there was this nice quartet of senior citizens. One of the ladies of the group touched my arm as we crossed paths and she said:

You know how beautiful she is, don’t you?

Of course she was referring to my beautiful, classy, elegant, and wonderful girlfriend, Miss Lauren. I answered in the affirmative to the lady and they ambled out.

After that we bought some supplies at the Oltorf and Congress HEB before heading back north. It was our intention to take a lunch with us ( the convention food sucks and there not so many options near the center ). Regrettably, the DST change had us not in the mood to do so this morning.

After heading in we attended tho 10am session on managing user identities. The presentation centered around the OpenId specification and how reputation is managed. It’s interesting because ID is who you say you are ( passport ) and reputation is what others say you are ( bad at knitting ). It was an interesting discussion that bridged both the psychological and the technological.

The next panel was one of the biggest disappointments, it was “Design Workflows at Work: How Top Designers Work Their Magic”. Now, from the title I was thinking that eminent designers such as Veerle Pieters would tell me how they conquer space, how they choose colors, how they choose palettes, etc. In short, something more like the amazing, but all too short presentation given by Khoi Vinh and Mark Boulton yesterday.

Instead it was “do you listen to music while you work” or “I think better in the shower”.

Total let-down.

In contrast to this disappointment, Khoi and Mark’s presentation had me, a no-art-talent having code-monkey dividing up a page into a grid, using 3:2 ratios to define base em elements and thinking up a new design for this blog.

Expert, focused, delivered, and absolutely worthwhile. Thank you Khoi and Mark!

The sky matched my overall mood and it was a raining gently as we hopped across the street for a quick bite at the Hilton.

None of the afternoon sessions were particularly to our liking so using our platinum badge power, we headed to the downstairs theater and caught “The Prisoner or: How I planned to kill Tony Blair”, which describes the horror story of a freedom-loving Iraqi journalist who, via mistaken identity, is taken by the US military, beaten, disappeared, sent to Abu Ghraib, survives insurgent mortar attack on the camp ( to say nothing of bug infested food and illness ). It was as heartbreaking as Terry Gilliam’s Brazil), but in such a horrible situation, the absurdity turns hilarious and all you can do is laugh, and be ashamed of the absolute mess that has been made of Iraq for our lofty dream of “making their lives better”.

We then caught an excellent discussion on “AJAX or Flash: What’s Right for You?”. It was delivered very well by Jonathan Boutelle of SlideShare.

The last presentation was on the future of Javascript. Summation? Looking more like Ruby and making DOM manipulation easier.

Bonus interaction from yesterday was Mark Boulton taking time to talk to Lauren and I about carving up space. He was a real gentleman and very friendly. Another bonus was getting to meet up with Khoi, I love his blog and his commentary so it was a real pleasure to shake hands and get an impeccably designed business card.

Wow!

“The Lookout” is one of the first movies all year that made me lean over to Lauren at the end and say “That was awesome”. I’m sorry “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “Children of Men”, you both were important and worthy, but this was out and out fun and suspenseful.

The main thing that I thought was great is that this may be one of the most tight scripts I’ve ever seen put to screen and that’s probably no accident as the director and writer were Scott Frank (Out of Sight, say no more). I never once had that feeling of “oh yeah, but where did he conveniently get implement X” or, “Oh yeah, the granny can handle the shotgun, sure” or “where did he conveniently become a master of kung-fu?”. No plot point was thrown in as part of a solution as a screenwriting conundrum, all the tools needed were part of the character’s natural evolution or back-story.

And what is the tight plot that was presented in the film? Essentially future hockey great and alpha male Chris ( Joseph Gordon-Levitt ) and his friends are pursuing a scene of pure rural beauty and enchantment when disaster strikes, leaving him with a memory condition that requires him to write things down.

“Uh, we saw that in Memento”.

Well, you did and you didn’t, my interlocutors. Memento hinged on a character having to write things down because he would forget them, this character writes them down because he has trouble with sequence, he has trouble with remembering the rules of what he has to do. So the pitch of his mental instability is not “Oh hell, he’ll forget”, but is something much more relatable, the feeling of having the word stuck on the tip of your tongue … but for every task that is required for day to day living.

The opening act of the film shows us his regular life within this maddening world of not quite able to be completely independent. He learns to live by repetition, pattern, and writing it down. He visits an independent living skills school. He works as a janitor in a small bank after hours. He shares his life, and his small, dingy apartment with Lewis, played wonderfully by a bearded Jeff Daniels ( this guy was in Dumb and Dumber, who knew!? ). Lewis is blind and, effectively serves as the “seer” and Greek chorus, uniting the acts where Chris’ difficulties can’t quite link up the narrative that we see, but that he cannot.

Chris lives his simple version of a life, occasionally taking time to watch skaters on the ice and have flashbacks to the accident. It’s a world where he can get by, thanks to his School for Living Skills, Lewis, his job, and his wealthy family’s funding of his car and rent. He dreams of a better job, perhaps working as a teller at the bank whose floor he buffs.

His life is our life.

Enter the devil.

Michael Goode’s character Gary comes to Chris, reminding him of entitlement, power, beauty, and strength: “your old life”. Through a series of orchestrations, Chris comes to trust Gary, believe in Gary, and believe that Gary can actually provide that most seductive of elixirs: your old life.

His life is our life.

And the temptations are potent. True (faked) respect, true non-discussion of his inabilities, and that most potent drug, the sweet perfume of the beautiful girl in the bar on your pillow ( played well by Isla Fisher ).

And once you’ve begun your habit, the rates get raised.

Gary pushes, cajoles, and coerces Chris into a part in the heist of his bank. The friends of Gary now turn into the list of the usual suspects: a safecracker, a driver, a leader ( Gary ), and the incomparable James Woods as “Bone”, the guy for “wet work”.

At this point you should see that Chris’ life is certainly in jeopardy and that it’s only a matter of success of the heist until he is at the business end of Bone’s shotgun.

So our protagonist, with certain mental limitations must figure out how to save his skin, maybe do the right thing, and maybe forge his own independent existence with his handicap.

The venue for the premiere was Austin’s beautiful and historic Paramount theater. Arriving about an hour early, bade holders wrapped around congress and onto the back side. Around 8:30 they started letting us file into the fine venue. Around 9:00 pm, the director and the cast entered. Present were Mr. Gordon-Levitt, Mr. Goode, the director, and Laura Vandervoort.

Afterwards there was an after-party at the Fox and Hound on 4th and Colorado. While we walked to the destination I asked Lauren if she was interested in attending and she was not. As such, we kept walking to the car, which was parked nearby.

We went back north, stopped at Kerby Lane north and then returned home because we knew that this morning would be busy with the first full day of SXSW Interactive.

More later, but catch “The Lookout” when it comes to your town!

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One of the movies that flicked across my radar this last year, but which I did not see in theaters was the indie noir/high school movie “Brick”.

Noir and high school? Yes, the very same. I’ll explain how the homages are done.

Brick occurs in a nameless burg in Southern California ( Orange County, if my eyes deceive me not ) where the cliques of high school are all the more pronounced; more like gangs. There’s the dope crew, the jock crew, the drug kingpin and his muscle, and our outsider protagonist, the information gatherer, Brendan.

The crew speak in noir-ese, Sam Spade style, ya see? Brendan finds himself on the receiving end of several knuckle sandwiches and manages to rough up when he needs to rough up. In this, we see all the rules of the noir film lovingly re-created.

Now, the high school angle..Hm. Well, it’s interesting because it takes school from the mundane frustrations about homework and parties and drug use, and puts them all as the tip of a seedy noir iceberg. This is very good. On the other hand, the reality of high school is silly because the kids never wind up at school, the kids never wind up in detention. School is really only a backdrop.

ALTHOUGH it provides the venue for another noir convention: the rough meeting with the chief. In the noir movie this is when the PI meets up with his old police boss. The one that thinks he played it too loose when he was on the force, who toed the line when our hero trampled over the nice and neat bureaucratic machine.

And who else plays the chief, er, the principal. Richard Roundtree, that’s right SHAFT (John Shaft…) himself. That was excellent.

It was a fun movie and I recommend it.

Back in the winter of 2002 when I was living in San Francisco I went to see the amazing City of God which featured the trailer for the then soon-to-be-released Raising Victor Vargas.

It was one of the movies that first broke out after high quality digital video became available to the masses of independent-minded film makers.

Unlike that phony and pretentious cynical aethetic called Dogme 95 ( by anti-humanist scab-picker Lars “von” Trier ), the natural light, the unsteady cam served to underscore the genuine moments when a macho boy decides to start trying to be a grown man.

The movie explores Victor’s sweltering summer as he becomes interested in “Juicy” Judy Gonzalez: the block’s resident hottie. At the beginning Victor is all swagger and boast. When trumped bravado prove to be his undoing he undergoes a series of setbacks which invite him to discover the man inside versus the posturing veneer he thinks he needs to express.

Along the way Victor’s Dominican family environment, his relationship with his grandmother, and his siblings is shown with a tender and realistic dialog. The subtle points of life in the Lower East Side are meticulously pointed out.

Further, it’s not just Victor who gets to evolve: his love interest, his siblings, his grandmother, his would-be girl’s best friend, his own best friend….everyone seems to be breaking through from a childhood reality to an undsteady, realistic, adult conception of the world.

It’s amazing, the vocabulary is still that of children, but the actions are those of adults. Sometimes the words are those of adults but the heartbreaks are befitting to innocent children.

It’s a very positive movie that is neither sentimental, dreamy, or pie-in-the sky. At the end I wanted to know what happened next and whether the characters would be happy.

I recommend it, unlike Dancer in the Dark or Breaking the Waves which exist to build straw men of humanity and make you feel bad.

When I was in my last year of high school, The Social B and I saw a hilarious movie, a hilarious movie beyond hilarity. A film which introduced to us the idea that a great many people lead lives of quiet desperation while waiting, discontentedly, on other people. They were people who, given no other options, were simply passing time wherever they were at and while they were doing that they’d had some funny thoughts about Star Wars, deviancy, rapping, and culture.

I knew that there were rogue movie makers out there, people who had guts and vision, people who wanted to tell the world about what their bit of America ( or wherever ) was like. They wanted to use that little corner as the backdrop for the tale of the economically underpowered in the blighted wasteland of American suburbia.

The movie that proved all this to me was Kevin Smith’s Clerks.

I can barely remember all the scenes, but I remember laughing so hard that I thought I might die during Berserker or during the magic number 37.

The characters, Randal and Dante ( the voyager of Hell, anyone? ) were a bit like Stoppard’s Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern: each aware that there was a richer plot of life happening around them, but seemingly powerless to break out of the limited and narrow story arc life had planned for them. No, instead as the clock wound past, the best these guys could come up with was an insightful debate as to whether the Rebels were actually bad guys in the Star Wars series because they blew up the Death Star II, which, as it was under construction, likely was full of some average Joes out for a paycheck and not expecting to get detonated as they did whatever they had to do to pull an Imperial check.

Regrettably, this legacy has been tainted by the horrid abortion that is Clerks II. Geez where to start? Let’s just say it’s terrible. The insightful, Stoppard-esque look into the life of clerking was rent asunder because Smith tried to give the characters depth.

No, no, and no.

I felt like the androgynous Matrix Girl: “No, no, not like this.” Please don’t have Randal do this: Not by having an 11th-hour, you’re my friend, as much as I tortured you moment.

Then there was the impossibly hot store manager Rosario Dawson. Wrong.

Somehow through the schmalz and the entirely unnecessary “donkey show” scene the message comes through: anyone can take control of his life, and stop being passive, and can choose a life of their own desires.

OK, great message, not like it’s new, but as most of humanity has yet to get it, it bears repeating.

…but why did you have to make the characters discovering this the merry, profane, let adorably addled characters from “Clerks”? Why not have Gigli do it?

Not like this, Kevin Smith. Not by taking your detached, beloved, victims of fate and putting them into a script any script-o-tron-2000 in Hollywood could have churned out. There were a few highlights.

Some great discussions were….

• Is “Porchmonkey” a racial epithet, can a white man claim it back
  • Wanda Sykes as an offended black patron hearing porch-monkey.
  • Randal’s listing of racial slurs that are worse than porchmonkey. Way to go, Smith! Getting that past the MPAA is this age was worthy
• Jay channels Jame Gumb’s (in-)famous “tuck scene” from “The Silence of the Lambs”
• Rosiario Dawson’s general not un-hotness
• Elias was totally awesome
  • The vaginal troll in his girlfriend
  • The mouth troll in his girlfriend
  • Randal dissing Lord of The Rings’ “total gayness” and multiple endings from the “Return of the King” so harshly that a Rings loving fan tosses cookies.
  • Elias likes transformers, that’s pretty good.

But that these points are not enough to make for a good movie. If, by some chance you go over to someone’s house and they rented it, you might watch it, if you’ve got some good nachos and a few beers ( both are required ), but this, in no way, approximates the brilliance of the original “Clerks”.