In 1998, Terrence McNally’s play “Corpus Christi” was first performed in New York City. It wasn’t hard to predict that portraying Jesus as a promiscuous homosexual living in Corpus Christi, Texas would inspire vehement condemnation from religious groups – and it most certainly did, as “Christians” spewed death threats against the members of the Manhattan Theater Group that first produced the play, and when the play opened in London in 1999 a British Muslim group issued a fatwa calling for the assassination of the playwright.
A few clues exist in the gospels that suggest Jesus’ sexual preferences might have made it a little easier to ignore the charms of the prostitutes he was willing to defend. Mentions of the “disciple who Jesus loved,” and “the kiss of Judas” provide fodder for interpretation, but in a larger sense, I think Jesus’ sexuality is entirely irrelevant with regards to the core message of his teachings. Whether Jesus had any sexual nature at all affects his legacy no more than Morrisey’s sexuality affects his lyrics or whether Kevin Spacey’s sexual preference influences the roles he inhabits.
Buddy Revel, the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of a bully in Three O’Clock High (1987), isn’t actually a bully. Bullying is a tool used to establish or enforce social dominance. And Buddy isn’t the slightest bit interested in the social dynamic at Weaver High School. As he clearly states to Jerry Mitchell (Casey Siemaszko) when the hapless young journalist attempts to engage him while they stand in front of a row of urinals, Buddy doesn’t want anybody to know anything about him. The enigmatic and elusive science fiction writer John Steakley wrote “Bullies don’t want to fight you. They don’t want to fight at all. They just want to beat you up.” And the exact opposite is true of Buddy Revel. He has countless chances to beat Jerry up. But he’s not interested in beating Jerry up. All he wants to do is fight him.
As it turns out, Buddy is more like the monster in a horror movie. He seemingly has the ability to be everywhere at once. Traditional authority figures are incapable of stopping him. And except for a moment of greed at the very end of the film, he seems to be motivated by nothing more than pure malice. He’s more of a caricature of a bully than an actual bully, which is absolutely necessary for the story to unfold as it does.
Why is gold valuable? Why is it worth anything at all? Sure, it’s yellow and shiny. But so is brass. It’s scarce, but so is osmium, and you don’t see anybody making jewelry out of that (actually, osmium is kind of poisonous, which is why it’s rarely used, and in those cases only as an alloy). Gold has got a low melting point and is very malleable, which makes it nicely workable, but also means it’s easy to scratch or dent. And it’s pretty damned cumbersome, too. So what’s so great about gold?
Actually, what really makes gold so great is its resistance to corrosion. It’s virtually impossible to dissolve, and doesn’t oxidize easily – meaning that it won’t rust, tarnish, or become discolored under normal circumstances. Remember the old redox potential tables from your high school chemistry? Gold is right up there near the top. Gold doesn’t get old. Sunken treasure can languish at the bottom of the ocean for centuries without losing its luster. Platinum has the same characteristics – except it’s more rare, and hence more valuable.
A few years ago, my dad took a vacation to Hawaii. While he was there, he tried surfing for the first time. Even though he’s a good athlete, and solid swimmer (a former lifeguard), he didn’t have much luck. As he explained it, he was able to get to his knees, but couldn’t progress upwards from there and stand up without losing his balance. During the few times that I’ve tried to give people surfing lessons, kneeling on the board is one of the mistakes I strongly caution beginners against (the other is to never, ever, ever let the board get between you and an incoming wave). It’s an understandable habit for anyone to develop – it makes sense to progress from your stomach to your knees – but I think members of my father’s generation are much more susceptible to this tendency, due to a fundamental difference in the way they approach athletics in general.
Stacey Peralta’s documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001) contains a few very important pieces of information that help explain the evolution of modern skateboarding. Chief among these is the illustration of the relationship between skateboarding and surfing, and how early skateboarders were attempting to imitate maneuvers that were performed in the water (something that is fascinating to me personally is how a reverse has taken place and now surfers often try to emulate maneuvers that were originally invented on skateboards). Equally important is the documentation of how a severe drought in the mid-seventies in Southern California led to the evolution of vertical skateboarding. And of course, the film pays a great deal of attention to the lifestyle that was associated with the early days of skateboarding, particularly amongst the original members of the Zephyr skateboarding team from Santa Monica. But something that the film isn’t quite bold enough to assert, but I think can be fairly argued, is that the physical orientation of a person riding a board – the very stance itself – served as a line of demarcation between generations. (more…)
There are fewer members of the Washington establishment that I detest more than Richard “Dickface” Cohen. I noticed yesterday evening that he’s finally soured on his hero John McCain, but I’m willing to predict that within a few weeks he’ll have decided that McCain has somehow regained his honor, and that Obama has committed some unforgivable transgression of campaigning, and at this point Cohen will happily resume shilling for the Arizona senator. Cohen is as much of a turncoat liberal as Joe Lieberman, and soon enough he’ll return, tail between his legs, to genuflect at the altar of power.
One of the most sickening episodes during the Bush administration, one that betrayed so many members of the Washington press as nothing more than sycophantic lapdogs for the establishment power structure, was the conviction of Scooter Libby and the commutation of his sentence by President Bush. Among the litany of abuses of the basic principles of both democracy and constitutional government, this was the one example that stood out to me as an unmistakable signal that our system of representational government, as articulated in the Constitution, was in dire jeopardy.
I’ve seen a number of lists of questions that the press should theoretically be asking Sarah Palin, if they ever get a chance to query her outside of a very strictly controlled setting (such as Charles Gibson’s interview, which was surprisingly adversarial). But I’ve got one question that’s been bugging me that I’d really like to see someone ask John McCain: “Did you think it was appropriate for the President to commute the sentence of convicted perjurer Scooter Libby, and would you have done the same thing?”
In Mike Judge’s 1999 comedy Office Space, its protagonist Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) is described by the downsizing consultants as a “straight shooter with upper management written all over him.” It’s a gross misjudgment on the part of the consultants, as Peter’s casual demeanor charmed them much the way that George W. Bush was able to charm almost half the voters of the United States of America the following year. Peter’s boss, the endlessly imitated Bill Lumbergh (Gary Cole), is a lousy manager himself, but he’s driven by enough of a sense of self-preservation to disagree with them, explaining that Peter isn’t the caliber of person they want in upper management, and that “he’s also been having some problems with his TPS reports.”
Satire is Mike Judge’s strongest suit, and the disintegration of American society into various facets of stupidity is a topic he confronted more broadly in his following film, Idiocracy (2006). But the focus in Office Space was much sharper, where work life in general was the target, but the workplace managers came under the heaviest fire. Playing a cameo as the manager of Chotchkie’s, Mike Judge himself is willing to step in as the target of ridicule, repeatedly castigating Peter’s girlfriend Joanna (Jennifer Aniston) for her insistence on wearing the minimum number of pieces of flair. It’s meaningless minutiae such as this that are clearly a source of such exasperation for Judge; cover sheets on TPS reports and pieces of flair are not important to how a business functions, and are a waste of time for management to concern themselves with.
One of of the most overlooked films of 2006 (a terrible, terrible year for movies; with redemption only brought by the likes of The Departed, Borat, and Casino Royale) was the noir high school murder mystery Brick. The independently produced film took a story and characters that would normally belong in a Dashiell Hammett novel and deposited them in the setting of an Orange County high school. The movie features the familiar face of Joseph Gordon-Levitt filling the role of the hard-boiled detective unraveling the conspiracy that resulted in the murder of his dame, and he inhabits the role so brilliantly that his performance instantly erased all of the ill will I’d harbored towards him for all those years he spent on Third Rock from the Sun.
While occasional films will address the tense high-school relationships between children and their parents or other authority figures (Rebel Without a Cause, The Breakfast Club, Dead Poets Society) most teen films conveniently relegate adult characters to the periphery, only letting them occasionally affect the events of the film. A variety of techniques can be used to ensure that adults stay out of the picture; they can be on vacation (Risky Business), absent (Napoleon Dynamite), dead (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire*), or simply invisible (Lucas). In Brick, the only adult figure (aside from a brief glimpse of the Pin’s mom) who becomes involved in the narrative in any way is the Assistant Vice Principal Gary Trueman (Richard Roundtree). And even AVP Trueman doesn’t really affect how the story plays out; he inhabits the hard-boiled detective novel equivalent of the local police chief who reluctantly agrees to allow the private detective the freedom of movement he needs to solve his case. And despite a number of scenes taking place during the school day, the high school campus is virtually deserted.** It’s these aspects of Brick that are the most challenging to an audience in terms of willingly suspending their disbelief.
With another potential Hollywood strike looming (the SAG contract has expired and the actors have yet to reach acceptable terms with the studios), it’s possible that reality television will see a revival in the coming year.Personally, I think that reality television has run its course, and we’ll see fewer and fewer non-scripted dramas appearing on network television. And honestly, it couldn’t make me happier.
I remember enjoying the first season of The Real World, which took place in New York City while I was still in high school.I found most of the contestants sympathetic enough, but I think that (aside from the background soundtrack, which was phenomenal) the genuine appeal in the show lay in the fact that their lives in the city were so vastly different from my mundane suburban existence.As I grew older, and my own life experiences became more similar to those of the contestants on the show, it began to be less and less interesting to me.It seemed like a waste of time to watch other people engage in relatively ordinary activities, like rollerblading around Miami, when I could just as easily get stoned and rollerblade around Claremont myself.
When I was living in Johannesburg, I spent about four months dating a woman who worked as a professional editor for film and television commercials. She put together a video of surfing clips for me to help me promote “Groundswell,” and while I was thrilled with what she did, I never had a full appreciation of just how much work video editing is until I tried my own hand at the task. As you might have seen three weeks ago, my own project was ridiculously simple. It consisted of a single image, a few simple fades, a sequence of white text scrolling over a black background, and a single splice of video pilfered from the end of a movie to include the final few logos that are standard issue for every credit reel. Getting these few things done kept me up until 4 AM during one evening and 2 AM on another.
I think editing is, from the audience’s perspective, the most underrated aspect of filmmaking. A film cannot be great without great editing. Lousy editing can ruin what would otherwise be a great film. And while clever editing will never be enough to save 90 minutes’ worth of crummy material, if you’re willing to claim that you’ve never in your lifetime been hoodwinked into seeing an awful movie simply on the strength of a well-edited preview, then I’m willing to call you a liar.
It’s the end of the road for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. A few signs lately have pointed towards Hillary finally packing it in, and after Barack Obama sweeps up enough of the black vote in the urban strongholds of Montana and South Dakota today to claim victory in these final two primary states, it’s likely that Clinton’s campaign will offer a formal concession. Hillary’s last-ditch effort to convince the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee to seat Michigan and Florida’s entire slates of delegates with full voting status (and award all of said delegates to her) failed, and her pitch to undecided superdelegates over the last month has mostly been falling on deaf ears. By the end, her surrogates’ statements about the which states “mattered” and specific, irrelevant ways the popular vote could be tallied to produce a slim lead for Hillary were beginning to insult everyone’s intelligence.
The nomination is decided by delegates. In the primary process, the total popular vote is no more critical to the outcome of the contest than passing yardage is to the outcome of a football game. Having Hillary attract superdelegates based on an absurdly subjective interpretation of which votes to count would be like seeing Green Bay Packers coach Mike McCarthy persuade the NFL that his team should represent their conference in the Superbowl because, even though his team had a lower number of points than the Giants in the NFC championship game, they forced more fumbles and had a higher field goal kicking percentage and would be a stronger matchup against the Patriots.
In 1998, Terrence McNally’s play “Corpus Christi” was first performed in New York City. It wasn’t hard to predict that portraying Jesus as a promiscuous homosexual living in Corpus Christi, Texas would inspire vehement condemnation from religious groups – and it most certainly did, as “Christians” spewed death threats against the members of the Manhattan Theater Group that first produced the play, and when the play opened in London in 1999 a British Muslim group issued a fatwa calling for the assassination of the playwright.
Buddy Revel, the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of a bully in Three O’Clock High (1987), isn’t actually a bully. Bullying is a tool used to establish or enforce social dominance. And Buddy isn’t the slightest bit interested in the social dynamic at Weaver High School. As he clearly states to Jerry Mitchell (Casey Siemaszko) when the hapless young journalist attempts to engage him while they stand in front of a row of urinals, Buddy doesn’t want anybody to know anything about him. The enigmatic and elusive science fiction writer John Steakley wrote “Bullies don’t want to fight you. They don’t want to fight at all. They just want to beat you up.” And the exact opposite is true of Buddy Revel. He has countless chances to beat Jerry up. But he’s not interested in beating Jerry up. All he wants to do is fight him.
Why is gold valuable? Why is it worth anything at all? Sure, it’s yellow and shiny. But so is brass. It’s scarce, but so is osmium, and you don’t see anybody making jewelry out of that (actually, osmium is kind of poisonous, which is why it’s rarely used, and in those cases only as an alloy). Gold has got a low melting point and is very malleable, which makes it nicely workable, but also means it’s easy to scratch or dent. And it’s pretty damned cumbersome, too. So what’s so great about gold?
A few years ago, my dad took a vacation to Hawaii. While he was there, he tried surfing for the first time. Even though he’s a good athlete, and solid swimmer (a former lifeguard), he didn’t have much luck. As he explained it, he was able to get to his knees, but couldn’t progress upwards from there and stand up without losing his balance. During the few times that I’ve tried to give people surfing lessons, kneeling on the board is one of the mistakes I strongly caution beginners against (the other is to never, ever, ever let the board get between you and an incoming wave). It’s an understandable habit for anyone to develop – it makes sense to progress from your stomach to your knees – but I think members of my father’s generation are much more susceptible to this tendency, due to a fundamental difference in the way they approach athletics in general.
There are fewer members of the Washington establishment that I detest more than Richard “Dickface” Cohen. I noticed yesterday evening that he’s finally 
In Mike Judge’s 1999 comedy Office Space, its protagonist Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) is described by the downsizing consultants as a “straight shooter with upper management written all over him.” It’s a gross misjudgment on the part of the consultants, as Peter’s casual demeanor charmed them much the way that George W. Bush was able to charm almost half the voters of the United States of America the following year. Peter’s boss, the endlessly imitated Bill Lumbergh (Gary Cole), is a lousy manager himself, but he’s driven by enough of a sense of self-preservation to disagree with them, explaining that Peter isn’t the caliber of person they want in upper management, and that “he’s also been having some problems with his TPS reports.”
One of of the most overlooked films of 2006 (a 
With another potential 
When I was living in Johannesburg, I spent about four months dating a woman who worked as a professional editor for film and television commercials. She put together a video of surfing clips for me to help me promote “Groundswell,” and while I was thrilled with what she did, I never had a full appreciation of just how much work video editing is until I tried my own hand at the task. As you might have seen 
It’s the end of the road for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. A few signs lately have pointed towards Hillary finally packing it in, and after Barack Obama sweeps up enough of the black vote in the urban strongholds of Montana and South Dakota today to claim victory in these final two primary states, it’s likely that Clinton’s campaign will offer a formal concession. Hillary’s last-ditch effort to convince the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee to seat Michigan and Florida’s entire slates of delegates with full voting status (and award all of said delegates to her) failed, and her pitch to undecided superdelegates over the last month has mostly been falling on deaf ears. By the end, her surrogates’ statements about the which states “mattered” and specific, irrelevant ways the popular vote could be tallied to produce a slim lead for Hillary were beginning to insult everyone’s intelligence.