Archive for November, 2006

Creatively Paranoid

by Glenn Vance on November 20, 2006 in Movies with No comments
1984

There is a film that pre­miered at Cannes this year called Short­bus. I don’t expect you to have heard about it or John Cameron Mitchell, the direc­tor of the film, but I read about this stuff, hence my knowl­edge of its exis­tence. The film is pretty much polit­i­cal porn, at least that’s what Mitchell says it is.

“It’s a lit­tle bit of a cri de coeur to us, a lit­tle bit of a call to arms” against the pre­vail­ing con­ser­vatism, he told a media con­fer­ence, adding that his coun­try was liv­ing in “the era of Bush, which is about clamp­ing down, being scared.” The 43-year-old, whose pre­vi­ous work was Hed­wig and the Angry Inch, about a trans­sex­ual rock singer, said the film was his own small act of defi­ance against Bush. “If you can’t do elec­tions you might as well do erec­tions,” he said.

More…

One scene likely to cre­ate con­tro­versy in the United States and some other coun­tries shows a gay three­some in which one par­tic­i­pant joy­fully bel­lows “The Star Span­gled Ban­ner.” The actor with the singing voice, PJ Deboy, said he did the scene to show that he was as Amer­i­can as any­one, despite resis­tance to gays in parts of the coun­try, includ­ing Washington.

“I thought to myself: “Can I do it…?’ And I decided I could, because it is a patri­otic act.… There’s noth­ing un-American about gay sex and there’s noth­ing unpa­tri­otic about it,” he said.

Tim Rob­bins, an actor I’ve liked for a long time, is cur­rently star­ring in a stage pro­duc­tion of George Orwell’s “1984?. His thoughts on the play -

“We have right now a media that is will­fully ignor­ing the high crimes and mis­de­meanors of the pres­i­dent of the United States…””(Bush) got us into (the Iraq) war based on lies that he knew were lies. … His war has recruited more al-Qaeda mem­bers than Osama bin Laden could ever have dreamed for … yet no one in the media is call­ing for impeach­ment,” he said.

“Unfor­tu­nately, the book and the play is more rel­e­vant now than it ever has been,” he said. “(It) talks about con­tin­u­ous war­fare as a means to con­trol the West­ern econ­omy, and as a way to con­trol rebel ele­ments within soci­ety through the use of fear, con­stant fear.”

“In my coun­try we seem to be sanc­tion­ing ren­di­tion­ing of inno­cent peo­ple with­out trial… put them in jail with­out telling any­one… and tor­ture them out of sus­pi­cion of what we think they might do,” Rob­bins said.

“This is exactly what Orwell was talk­ing about when he spoke of thought crimes,” he added.

You may not know this, but as soon as the 3 peo­ple above said what they said, they were whisked away to a secret CIA prison camp where they were tor­tured and humil­i­ated for say­ing and doing what they did.

Yeah, right.

Why do film mak­ers feel that they’re under con­stant per­se­cu­tion, when they live in the freest coun­try in the world? Many places, they wouldn’t be able to even make these films or say what they are say­ing. It’s just foolish.

I’m Lost

by Glenn Vance on November 7, 2006 in Television with 1 Comment
lost-final-season

I’ve been feel­ing it for awhile, and I’ve started see­ing the same thoughts I’m hav­ing start pop­ping up across the inter­net : I’m prob­a­bly done with Lost. It was nice and fine when it began, but I think it’s over with.

I thought it was a great con­cept — 40ish peo­ple crash land on a deserted island and have to sur­vive. Mean­while strange things start hap­pen­ing. What’s caus­ing it? Well, tune in next week and learn some more. In the mean time you’ll learn about the peo­ple that you’re fol­low­ing through flash­backs to their lives off of the island. Not a bad idea for a show.

And I stayed around for months, years now. Two and a half years as it is, and I tune in duti­fully week after week, like all of the other peo­ple who have been there from the begin­ning or got hooked on the show at some point dur­ing its run. Every Wednes­day at 8 pm was Lost, and you watched it for clues and then you talked about it the next day at work, and you pon­dered the mean­ing of lit­tle things and hoped and prayed that your theory(s) would be addressed at some point.

What is the mon­ster? What was Walt’s power? How did he draw ani­mals to him? How did he man­i­fest him­self when he was some­where else? Who was the guy that Jack thought was his father? Who’s the guy that Eko thought was his brother? Was it the smoke mon­ster? How did Locke lose the abil­ity to walk? Was Char­lie ever doing more heroin on the island that he found in the plane that Eko’s brother showed up in? Why did Boone have to die? What hap­pened to Desmond’s boat? What was the deal with that shark that had a Dharma logo on it? Where did Rose’s can­cer go? What’s with the mag­net­ism on the island? And what do the Num­bers mat­ter for?

All are some of the ques­tions I’ve got about this show, and I know from the episode where Jack watches the Boston Red Sox win the World Series that they’re only 70 days into their stay on the island. At this rate Sun will finally have her baby along about sea­son 12 or so. Time moves slower here, things hap­pen more rapidly on the island than in our world, since we wait an entire week to watch one or two days on the island.

And it’s get­ting tedious. There are bet­ter, far bet­ter, shows out there (Bat­tlestar Galat­ica) and shows that are more inter­est­ing (Heroes), so why stick around for Lost any­more? The rat­ings for the sea­son 3 opener of Lost were down 1 mil­lion view­ers from the sea­son 2 finale. One mil­lion view­ers is a lot of ad dol­lars to ABC. Are they going to start prod­ding the show’s cre­ators to start giv­ing more infor­ma­tion to get peo­ple back?

If they would just cough up some big plot points (Why the crashed, who the Oth­ers are, where the island is, what the mon­ster is) they could always cre­ate new plot points, like they did in the sea­son 2 finale with the huge stone foot Sayid saw on the beach. But instead they drip out minu­tia week after freak­ing week with no secrets revealed.

Why should I stick around for a show that I feel takes me for granted? Why should I watch a show where I know almost no more about the Lostie’s sit­u­a­tion now than I did when it began? Will ABC force changes to the show in order to get peo­ple back? And since it’s not even my favorite show on TV any­more, why should I care about Lost now?