Much Ado About Quentin

Let me say first that I love movies. I think that next to literature, all things film are glorious, minus the business aspect anyway. Whether it is the acting, screenwriting, cinematography, and/or editing related part of the creation, as much as anything in the arts, moving pictures touch me the most and influence my perceptions of culture. Baseball was my first love as a boy, and the Dodgers remain my passion, but the game has changed with corporate ownership, PEDs, and merchandising that borders on propaganda mind control. Movies changed, too, but for whatever reason, I considered them partially prostituted anyway, so seeing baseball become a low-grade hooker in the last 30 years has been more jarring to my false innocence.

I used to go to films so often I knew the theater workers better than my siblings. In my 20s, I'd go to the Syufy Cinedome Theaters in Orange twice or three times a week for the matinee - $2.50 before 2 PM. I had a night job so it was great for a film lover. I once anticipated film openings as if I were some sort of underground version of Walter Winchell. All the ships at sea would one day know of my feelings about Red Sonja or whether or not I enjoyed Pale Rider more than Silverado. It was pre-internet, and I was a dork just a few years removed from playing D&D.

All of this is preface to my anti-review of the latest film by Quentin Tarantino (writer-director), Inglourious Basterds, because I have no nice way of expressing what I am about to do, so I thought I'd begin wistfully. I wish I could have said this right off because it pains me to say it, but I told you that stuff about myself because typing this actually hurts.

Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is not a good film. The plot is too ambitious, the characters varied and overmany. 2/3 of the lines are spoken in a language other than English and 90% of those are subtitled. At film's end I turned to my buddy Dave and his wife Lora and said, "Disappointed . . ." And I still am.

I have read no other reviews of this film, and have no idea what the pros think. Perhaps I'm the only one who feels this way. I can say this much, and that is that I went into that theater to see a Tarantino war movie in the vein of Don Siegel, Samuel Fuller, Sergio Leone, and Sam Peckinpah. I wanted a bloodfest of dead Nazis and I wanted to see Jews get payback on white power bastards. I have no qualms with films that are homages, ripoffs, or borrowed techniques of other directors. I actually like that style of film. I expect Quentin to wax Antonioni as he drag-pans his camera here and there. I expect anachronisms aplenty because Quentin cares nothing for such purist drivel. He makes movies that pop and the devil take the hindmost.

So when I say this movie was not good, I mean it and I say it with head lowered. Professional film critics get free admission, press releases, and access to interviews I do not get. But I spent $10.50 of my own teacher's pay greenbacks to see this, and I wish now that I had waited until my friend could pirate me a decent copy next week. Even then, I would have been disappointed.

In my limited but extremely wisened and layered "watched-400-movies-on-VHS-in-25 years-and-another-200-in-theaters" over the same span experiences, this film is Tarantino's worst effort as a director, and as a writer. I usually like Tarantino films, and three of my all-time top 25 are Quentin's babies, but this was just not a good one. UGH!

Was that clear enough? I hope so.

So here goes a few reasons why. You can stop reading now if you like. I know how it goes. If you like a filmmaker, and if you haven't seen his latest effort, and some dickhead pans it, you start to think, "What does your dumbass know anyway?" Who are you, David freaking Lean? Go back to community theater and try out for 'Pippin' again, reject!" I understand that feeling. And you may be correct, except to say, in my defense, I'm too tall to play a hunchback anyway . . .

So allow me to explain the ways that I see Tarantino's latest mondo-actionfest effort as a poor product. There are no spoilers, as this is less a blow-by-blow than it is a post-mortem. I watched this less than 16 hours ago and I'm still bummed out at how it failed to deliver the goods.

What's Wrong With "Inglourious Basterds"

The Dialogue - Normally sharp and irregular simultaneously, this Tarantino script dragged like a dog with no legs. His script lacked the flow of Pulp Fiction or From Dusk Till Dawn, arguably the writer's two finest hours for melding multiple characters into a nice combo of funny, profane, profound, and uneven humanity. Other than the lead character of Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), most of the cast was stuck staring languidly across the lens, speaking lines that had little sizzle whatsoever. Yes, there were good moments, but this film lasted an obtuse two-and-half hours, and I assessed its best lines as totalling perhaps 15 minutes of screen time. Younger viewers will doubtless quote lines like "I want my scalps" or "Business is a-Boomin'!" as if these cleverly black whimsies rained from the film's heavens - but they did not. There were times when I wished the characters would either die off quickly or lose their ability to speak, but please GOD stop blurting out your nonsensical, non-realistic blather. I do not blame the actors, as most did the best they could. I blame Quentin. It was his script, or as he called it recently, "my masterpiece." Sorry, but it is not and you've done far, far better, Mr. T.

The Gore Factor - When you make stuff go splat like QT does, your fans hope for the usual. Gimme an ear slice, gimme a point-blank execution, gimme vampires and zombies popping like rotten cantaloupes on hot pavement. Yeah, GORE! This film's problem is the predictability of the splatter. At no point was I genuinely surprised, and no situational irony of any kind arose to make me think, "Dear God, he isn't going to show THAT, is he?" Oh sure, there's ample scalp-taking, knife-carving, bat-swinging and gunshot-riddled Nazis, and good guys, bad guys, and even bar girls get dead inventively enough in this flick. But it was too rote, too expected, and too, too "Meh!"

Allow me to return to my earlier baseball framework here, so bear with me, please. QT's movie gore has become what Barry Bond's last 200 home runs were in his steroid phase. Both could do their thing well before they started cheating. Both saw others steal their technique and gain fame as well. Both reacted to that imitation by going for a compromise in their approach to their art. Bonds and Tarantino act as if MORE is better because of excess alone, not because of the quality of the process itself. If I lost some of you non-baseball fans, I apologize. It is just that Tarantino need not show off his flair any more, yet he keeps fetishistically going for some sort of goreapalooza in his movies. I'm over it and this is the worst I've seen from him. Be new and better, not just more graphic for its own sake. In a zombie film like Planet Terror, it makes a certain measure of sense, but I've seen Nazi movies like Peckinpah's Cross of Iron and Siegel's Hell Is for Heroes and those films were just as horrifying in their violence without the cheap jolts that QT uses in this mess. Neither of Don's or Sam's iconic WWII tales required a bat-braining scene like this film employs. Oddly enough, Inglourious Basterds was graphic but ridiculous that way, and I consider Gaspar Noés' ferocious bludgeoning scene (in 2002's Irréversible) the standard of what Tarantino tried to do here but failed to achieve. Gaspar wanted to horrify you in that film - SUCCESS, Gaspar ~ Epic Fail, Quentin! Finally, neither Peckinpah nor Siegel of old needed nor wanted the viewer of their film to laugh at what was not, in truth, evil and disgusting. They let war's horrors be horrifying, not farcical.

The Cutesy Comments - Suffice it to say that Inglourious Basterds has a hatful of these Tarantino quoteables. I'll give him his due. I laughed a few times, but a few means five or six times in this case. In the theater in which I watched the film, the laughs were common early but tapered off to a scattered few by the halfway point and were pretty much nil by the last reel. If you remove the Aldo Raine character from this film, and if Brad Pitt were NOT cast in this key role, I assure you that those same lines that got laughs and snickers would have netted almost no such reaction. Tarantino stunt casted with Pitt, an actor I don't laud often but who is a talented performer regardless of how paparazzi-ed out his persona has become. The guy can act, and he saves this film from being a total loss. Several other actors try hard and do what they can, but because half of this film is subtitled from French and German into English, I must say that I would have preferred they left the titles out. If you are reading them it is tough to appreciate the silent film stylings that most of the unknown actors in this film were usuing to affect their characters. The fact that most of the cast faces a fatal mission to go undercover into Nazi-occupied France and they die trying to fight the evils of fascism makes you WANT to watch their faces, but you cannot, because you are reading subtitles.

Stunt Casting - Putting Mike Myers into a British officer's role for seven minutes, or giving Rod Taylor a few lines to play a muted version of Winston Churchill, or letting us hear Samuel Jackson do mindless voice-overs or a disembodied Harvey Keitel speak over a telephone at film's end does not mean a movie is good. It sure does not make the script better. Wasting fine German actors like Christoph Waltz (as Nazi Hans "The Hawk" Landa), Diane Kruger (as Bridget von Hammersmark, a boiled down hybrid of Marlene Dietrich & Hedy Lamarr, real life European actresses who doubled as spies for the Allies), and Sylvester Groth (a brilliantly creepy Joseph Goebbels) in a film this bad makes me wonder why Tarantino bothers to place his old pals in cameo roles anymore. It is as if he wants us all to know how these stars were in his former films. Well, Quentin, we get it, and these stars you drop into your project like so many rats in a maze, merely to speak a line and leave . . . they detract from where the focus ought have been - on your script and on those actors who tried to form the core of the action. They deserved better, and sadly, they could not save your film.

So, that's a mess more verbiage than I might have opted for here, but if you read my District 9 review a week or so ago, you know I'm a wordy bastard. I swear I meant to keep this shorter, but fear not. You can read this in less than 15 minutes, and know that in that same amount of time, Tarantino managed to write an equal amount of dialogue into a 153-minute massacre of French, German, English, and Brooklynese.

But I guess if you kill Nazis by the bushel and make carnage seem cool, an albatross script and a macro-managed plotline can be forgiven. To me, it cannot be. I'll re-watch Reservoir Dogs this week and try to remember how good QT used to be. I hope he rebounds next time, because I want him to be great again.

Finski

Disturbing Photos of Angela Lansbury

More here if you're so inclined.

Hirohito's Ghost Responds to My Haiku

The understated brilliance of "Bicycle Haiku" has been praised by critics and laymen alike throughout the globe...except Japan. Apparently my haiku is an affront to their culture. Who knew! American cars are burning in the streets of Yokohama, school girls are jumping in front of subway cars in protest, and now Emperor Hirohito himself has risen from the grave to respond to my haiku with a haiku of his own. Think of it as a rap battle, but between a blogger and a dead Japanese emperor instead of Dre and Easy E. I now hand the floor over to the goryō...

This is not haiku
You have caused us to lose face
Now stop this nonsense

Well. That was harsh. This isn't over Hirohito! I shall respond in kind before the next full moon.

Damage Control is a Terrible Book

On the lookout for some mindless escape, this book’s desert inspired cover caught my eye at the store one day, so I took a look at the summary on the back. It’s a crime novel set in a small Arizona town where a bag with human remains is discovered after a rainstorm. Dostoevsky it ain’t, but it sounds engaging enough to provide a brief respite from the torments of daily life.

So much for that. Let me say this bluntly, J.A. Jance is a hack and Damage Control is easily one of the worst books I’ve ever read.

The fact that this woman is a “bestselling author” is a sad commentary on the state of American publishing. The average high school student could write a better work of fiction than this drivel. Basic principles of story telling are ignored and the author just continually heaps more and more meaningless tripe in there to try and fool the reader into thinking there is something worth reading here.

You want specifics? OK.

I’ll start by pointing out the obvious. “Sheriff Joanna Brady is busy” is not a plot.

Among the items Jance puts on the Sheriff’s plate are two suicidal old people, a dead body in a bag, feuding sisters, a suspicious fire, a slumlord, a missing child with a whore mother, poison chocolate sauce, a cheating father, a cheating ex-husband, a difficult mother, missing developmentally disabled people, developmentally disabled people possibly having sex, a rental property, a teenager, an infant, a nosey reporter, departing staff, a dead deputy, an FBI investigation into her personal finances, and a husband preparing to depart on a book tour.

It’s all just another day in the life of Sheriff Brady!

It’s also an incoherent mess Mr. Schag would have handed back to me covered in red ink and a big fat F if I had written it when I was 15.

Jance doesn’t even try to link it all together in a compelling way. The book is supposed to be a “suspense” novel. The two main plot lines are the old people who commit suicide and the dead body discovered in the desert. If you were writing a suspense novel, which one would you focus on? Probably not the old people, right? Right? Bueller?

The suspicious body in the desert is ignored for ages and gets wrapped up quickly only near the end of the book where it appears Jance was coming up on her page count. Hundreds of pages are spent on the old couple and their feuding daughters with the big break in the case coming thanks to chocolate sauce. This sounds more like a twist that fell on M. Night Shyamalan’s cutting room floor than a break in a real criminal case.

About a hundred pages in I realized I didn’t care what was happening, but boredom and the hope that it would get better kept me going. Somewhere around the midpoint I quit hoping and just decided to slog it out to bring you this scathing review and warning:

Never, ever read Damage Control or any other “suspense” novel by J. A. Jance.

District 9: Prawns ala Jackson, aka CGIFriday in Fullerton

Skynet: California would like to welcome our newest writer, Mr. Finski. A cunning linguist and hot air balloon enthusiast, Finski has something to say about District 9. It has something to do with aliens as far as I can tell.

As I settled into the red velveteen chairs at the Fullerton AMC in culturally bereft Orange County yesterday, I hoped for one thing out of this Peter Jackson action flick: alien splatter. Such was my simple hope, and I can attest that the director of the famous Tolkien "LotR" saga brought the gore home in this film. He likewise brought urine, vomit, viscera, teeth, fingernails, and interspecies fornication. For $10, I left happy. In the end, District 9 (directed by Neill Blomkamp, written by Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell, produced by Peter Jackson) had more nutritional value than the cardboard popcorn and the chemically-flavored Diet Coke I purchased for $9.75. Next time, I'll bring my own snacks.

To be fair, however, aliens versus gun-toting humans rarely leaves me displeased. I rank horror fare in the following order of highest to lowest: zombies, aliens, werewolves, vampires, undead (minor variant on zombies), and psycho killers. So when I saw the trailer for District 9, and I noticed that Peter Jackson, creator of 1992's little-known gem Dead-Alive (released in the states as the lamely-titled Braindead), had brought this apparent alien slaughter effort to the theaters, I promised I would see it with no impedance. I would see it without reading a review, knowing anything whatsoever about the plot outside of what the trailer promised, and I would try to catch a poorly attended screening. Myriad idiots in a theater can only decrease my enjoyment. I recall watching noontime screenings of Blue Velvet in 1986 and Reservoir Dogs in 1992. I was alone after three other people left David Lynch's Reagan era masterpiece in the first half an hour, and five strangers joined me to watch the entire visual blitzkrieg of Tarantino's crime spree frolic in the fall 17 years ago. Great violence, human oddity, alienation, and disjunct plot twists belong to a smattering of oddballs like me, and too many bodies in a theater seem to ruin my joy. I want the freak experience but I like it in a remote setting with a BIG screen and velveteen seats. District 9 at the Fullerton AMC delivered on all but the numbers, as there were about 25 poeple in the theater for a 4:20 show. But that wasn't too bad for a such a major release as this. It might have been far worse, and in the end, the audience was fine. No one talked, texted, or interrupted the film so it all worked out well. Reactions to action were appropriate, so this time, I was gathered with like-minded twistos, and this made me very happy.

Joining me in this effort were two close friends; Stephen and Lacey, the former a fellow teacher and the latter his teacher-fiancee. Neither knew much of the plot either, so we three purists walked into Fullerton's megaplex emotionally unarmed and prepped for whatever attacked our senses. I will relate below as much of the blow-by-blow, splatter-by-pop action as I can recall 24 hours later as I type this. I do not post spoilers, but truthfully, if you think this movie is trying to make you think it's The Crying Game, don't bother. It has a certain highbrow subtlety in it somewhere, but this is a great big sci-fi, alien~killer flick, and Jane Austen has nothing to do with the script. It's like telling someone who wins the war before they see Gone With the Wind ... if that gets them mad, they are too stupid to watch the movie anyway.

As District 9 begins, it looks and feels a bit like Cloverfield. There is the handcam-method employed throughout, and the video-to-film crossover that has become the new Blair Witch concept of CGI action movies the last ten years or so. Right away, I start to get that woozy, I-wish-I-didn't-wolf-my-popcorn&soda-feeling. If you have vestibular system concerns, this might not be your best choice for a two-hour experience. Stephen and Lacey had issues with it, but I bit down hard and managed to pass the nausea by the halfway point, as did Lacey. Stephen was still reeling at movie's end, but he's the art-house type. He actually watches 'Masterpiece Theater' ...

In any event, the film is set in Johannesburg, South Africa in current day, where we see a ginormous alien vessel (similar to Independence Day's mondo skyships, or perhaps a bit of Spielberg's Close Encounters spacecraft of the 70s) hovering over the city. Through narration & interviews by a newsreel-documentary clearly created AFTER some sort of disaster-cataclysm, we learn it hovered there for 20 years. During that time, no attacks by the aliens occurred, so early on, a human military team boards the ship. On it are found over a million aliens, malnourished, filthy, and clearly dying if not given aid. Down on African terra firma, a refugee camp springs up, and for the two decades that precede the film's main action, it is obvious these aliens, nicknamed by the slur of "prawns" by the Afrikaans and native people of South Africa, become an economic hardship for the country.

Enter the film's version of the UN, called MNU for Multi-National United. An MNU force, led by a paper-pushing, wormy geek named Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley in his major-market acting debut) is appointed to issue eviction notices to the 20-year resident prawns of the District 9 province, the alien ghetto's official name and the reason for the film's cryptic nomenclature. When imagining the setting here, think Hoovervilles with a decided Palestinian, Gaza strip feel, and you'll understand how allegorical this part of the film feels.

Merwe starts off rather annoying, and I was certain he'd be alien meat by the first reel's end. Yet, he grows on you, and he grows in other ways consistent with the film's sci-fi plot, too. But Merwe is an anti-hero protagonist indeed. Like Charlie Babbitt in Rainman, you think this guy is a jackass, a clown, and that he deserves a first class ass-kicking. But like Charlie Babbitt, he exonerates himself as the film progressess, with great suffering and at great personal loss to himself. Merwe gets kicked, slapped, and smacked about to be sure. He even gets a first rate antagonist, a macho, military team commanding mope who must back-up MNU on this dirty job; he is a flat-bastard SOB military stud straight out of HALO. He loves killing prawns, and he brings extra ammo just so he can kill them with gay abandon. I tried finding the actor's name on the IMDB site, but the film is so rampant with nobody actors, it's like trying to buy a vowel on Al Jazeera's version of "Wheel of Fortune" ... I gave up after the fifteenth character named 'MNU Guard' with no photo came up on the filmsite. Suffice it to say, 'MNU Bastard Killer HALO Guy' makes it well into the final scenes of the film, and he gets a roaring send off. This is not unexpected, so it is not a spoiler. If you think it is, please do me a favor - do not vote or breed. Just stay home and watch Fox News or "One Tree Hill" ... thank you.

Back to the story - Merwe wants to do this eviction task by the book, and the eye-rolling of the soldiers towards the desk-jockey in charge is familiar to anyone who loved the interplay of the cast in 1986's Aliens. What Paul Reiser was to Bill Paxton's crew of grizzled marines in space, Merwe is to these prawn-mashing, take-no-prisoner, modern day gladiators. It's formula, but in this film, it works. It is a vehicle to get the plot moving because there is an ongoing sense that something really bad will happen soon, and happen it does, in vivid color.

In a subplot, we learn that Merwe is a married man, whose father-in-law saddled him with this media-nightmare of knocking on alien doors in a biohazard ghetto that makes modern day images of Somalia, Darfur, and Baghdad look like Bel Air. Yet, Merwe is gung-ho, can understand prawn language (which the viewer gets subtitles for, understandably), and he gleefully directs the camera that follows him to get the details of this co-civilian/martial endeavor in all its gory glory. Now, Merwe's father-in-law is an archvillain, megacorporate, Dick Cheney type, Haliburton executive, and later developments of the plot are clearly manipulated by his character. Again, it is a familiar structure, but because District 9 does not try to be a psychological treatise on the military-industrial complex, it doesn't drag the plot out. It just drops it in front of you and lets you pick up on it or not. If you don't get it early, you'll get it later. Just watch because District 9 moves at about 75 mph throughout the first quarter of the film, and only slows to 65 for the last three-fourths. This is rapid fire stuff, and it is ferret-attention span friendly.

So, the hope of MNU is to relocate the prawn-refugees 200 kilometers away from South Africa's capital, apparently to that region's equivalent of San Bernardino, where the only people who will care about the filthy, crime doing, cat-food eating, scraggy-looking aliens will be the extras left over from the set of The Gods Must Be Crazy. Several eviction notice scenes are shown, with soldiers playing the role of modern day My Lai massacre monsters, and with the obvious memories of South Africa's apartheid era clear for all to see as well. This aspect of District 9 is what works best. It lets you the viewer discern the level of the symbolism, of what is concrete and what is abstract. Take whatever you want from it, because the action won't tarry for long.

Before 30 minutes of this 112 minute journey are over, however, the real conflict rears its otherworldy head: Merwe gets exposed to a black alien fluid from a confiscated canister he couldn't keep his clerical schnoz out of. So begins the major plot, as our human hero becomes infected by alien illness. He coughs, feels nausea, eats some fast food to coat his stomach, then projectile vomits several times. Not to be out done, plenty of prawns void their urethras, gullets, and nether regions as well, and a few bloodlettings of prawns by humans, and humans by prawns, color the shaky-view screen for our enjoyment. Courtesy of the camera's movement, combined with the aliens fighting tooth and nail to resist eviction, you may well start to join Merwe in a pretty honest portrayal of what this mythical alien concentration camp might look, feel, and smell like. I counsel eating no greasy, salty, or spicy meals prior to seeing this film, lest you wish to mimic Merwe . . . matter of fact, the Wii version of this may have a Vomi-attachment for electro-gacking onto your carpet at home, complete with a cross promotion with Resolve carpet cleaner. If this happens, just remember, I said it first!

As the film develops, an interesting thing happens, however. Two prawns become crucial to the plot, and through them, sympathy switches in the audience, quite purposefully, I am sure, to the filmmakers' intentions. Meet Alien #1 - Christopher Johnson (played by Jason Cope, whoever he is, utterly unrecognizeable under his squid tentacles and exoskeletal CGIsuit). Christopher is the prawn who has a plan to leave earth by re-boarding the hovering ship, returning home, and saving his people. His sidekick, Alien #2, is his toddler son, Little CJ. CJ is as close as this film comes to being a kid-flick, as I'm sure a doll of little CJ is forthcoming. Unlike the Ewok dolls of the early 80s however, if a CJ doll wets himself in the home version, you'll need a biohazard suit to clean up the stuff that jets from his orifices.

The last half of District 9 thereby becomes the Merwe & Christopher show. Merwe becomes the hunted one, as his infection & subsequent mutations make him wanted by the bioweapons division of MNU, while Christopher tries to keep his son alive and somehow re-capture the black fluid canister which contains the fuel he needs to fly his hidden spaceship up to the mothership, redock, and get his prawn ass home again. Of course, Merwe starts to see the goodness in this fatherly prawn, and Christopher starts to appreciate Merwe's predicament. But it is not a clean and easy characterization. There are moments when you wonder if double crosses are going to happen, and as good plots go, this one allows for a few ironic hesitations, and I appreciated that it wasn't all as neat and tidy of a script as I assumed it would be. It isn't Melville, but it isn't as inane and insipid as Dan Brown's ignoramus DaVinci Code leaps of stupidity either.

Along the way of Merwe and Christopher's odyssey, Nigerian underworld figures, evil MNU soldiers, biotech chemists, weapons testers, black magic voodoo hookers, and a mess of alien-DNA activated ray guns enter, exit, and just say hello to the viewer at warp speed, while a googleplex of humans and prawns go pop, glurg, splat, and arrrrgh while instantly dissipating into smears of red, black, blue, and green in all of CGI's imagineered glory. One particular sequence involves Merwe manning a prawn cybertank, straight out of Robocop's badborg ED209. It allows for the requisite shootout, chase scene that every decent western has had since the genre was first mastered by Howard Hawkes and John Ford, and if you replaced Merwe and Christopher with Christian Bale and Russell Crowe in the recent remake of 3:10 to Yuma, the only difference would be the weaponry. Likewise, my fave moment involves an alien-monstro grenade imbedding itself into a Nigerian gangsta's cranium, hanging out for a blue-glowing two-second count as the fellow realizes his time has come, and then the whole mess goes up in computer-generated happy happy. Jesus wept, but I love a "He blowed up REAAAL GOOD" scene in a flick, and that qualifies as the best one in some time for this sicko.

District 9 is a summer action film and I'd rate it a 9 if I wasn't the biggest bastard ever. I gave a 9 to Aliens and The Fly 23 years ago, and those films were really, really good and truly classic. I have never rated an action film a 10 because I save that number for films like Harold and Maude and Rashomon. So, giving District 9 an 8/10 is a high compliment for an old curmudgeon like me. I liked that it left room for a sequel, but again, it didn't beat you over the head with it. It just allows for the possibility that there may be a District 10 around the next corner, in a summer far, far away, where the prawns and the humans will one day eviscerate each other again.

~ Finski "Not As Fat as Ebert or as Dead as Siskel"

President Obama is not a Bond Villain

No Virginia, President Obama isn't going to kill your grandmother. He wasn't born in Kenya and he's not going to start up re-education camps.

Right wing America...its time to come back to reality.

We elected a pretty mainstream Democrat, not a diabolical Bond villain with a secret plot for world domination. How can you tell? Well, for starters, his health care reform plan that scares you so because its "evil" and "marxist" isn't even real socialized medicine. It gives you the option of buying insurance from the government, and we all know damn well by the time the lame brains in the Senate water it down enough to pass it likely won't even do that. You're still going to have the privilege of getting gouged and over-medicated by the for-profit bloodsuckers at Blue Cross, Blue Shield, and Kaiser Permanente (thrive!).

I'm all for a political debate, but you can't argue policy when one side of the aisle is frothing at the mouth over things no more real than Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.

Bicycle Haiku

Thank you bicycle
Only you can keep me sane
Riding down the hill

Federal Court Orders California to Release 43,000 Prisoners

Conditions at prisons in this state are so bad, that a federal court has ordered California to release 43,000 prisoners, or 27% of our prison population, within two years. The California prison system is designed to hold 84,000 people and currently holds 158,000, operating at 188% of its designed capacity. The cramped conditions of the prison system result in the otherwise preventable death of one prisoner per week. Governor Schwarzeneggar supports a plan that would move some prisoners into home detention or county jails, but many offenders will be released early. My guess is that our Three Strikes law has something to do with this.