It's Mii

Not as cool as my South Park Torgo, but a respectable waste of 10 minutes.

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Revisionist History

Here is a nice letter defending a group of students and their 1999 sit-in.

I wasn't at the sit-in, but I wrote about it. The letter has a link to a project I worked on after graduation. It's a project I'm glad to see is at least somewhat remembered (though the website isn't mentioned in the print version of the magazine).

WTF moment: Song of the South

WTF moment for today, from this article on Disney rereleasing "Song of the South":

"Older audiences probably would have more of a connection with the stereotypes, which were considered harmless at the time."

Harmless? By whom? "You know, Strom Thurmond really didn't have a problem with these stereotypes. He was always saying that if we'd had more movies like 'Song of the South,' we wouldn't have all these problems we have today."

Movie Review: Kissing Jessica Stein

Kissing Jessica Stein: Torgo disapproves

This movie should be subtitled: Adventures in Lesbianism. It's not that bad of a movie. My main problem is that it glorifies what might be called gay-trolling, which has nothing to do with gay trolls and everything to do with exploiting someone because your regular life is boring.

Jessica Stein is 100% straight but, after getting tired of not finding the right guy, she answers an ad and ends up in a relationship with Helen. Helen's willing to look past Jessica's being straight for what seems like a year, then decides she can't do it anymore. So Jessica goes merrily back to her straight life.

This movie could have been about being experimental, trying new things, being open and accepting, but it's too much of a standard 90's-style romantic comedy. There's a clear and rigid formula to the plot. It gets to that point where the happy couple has their first big fight (over Jessica's unwillingness to take Helen to her brother's wedding), then the lead has to be consoled by her wise, accepting friend (here, her mother), realize her mistake, and go running back.

There are also too many moments, particularly early on, when the writers are trying to prove their merits as writers. The poetry of Rilke is used to show that only the brightest and best know Rilke. That may be true, but it's written in such as a way as to say "Look, we know Rilke. We're smart people."

I said this isn't that bad of a movie. It has its funny moments. And it captures the awkward ecstasy of the early stages of relationships well. I just wish it didn't feel like such Lesploitation.

Kit, Thad or Steny

Why name your kid Kit, Thad or Steny? Because then he'll be made fun of throughout adolescence, grow deeply bitter, and become a Senator just to get back at his enemies.

If you name your three kids Kit, Thad and Steny, they'll form a super-Senator alliance and all be featured in this article.

Movie Review: Scoop

Scoop: Torgo disapproves

This movie isn't good. It has potential. It just fails continually and sadly to live up to any of that potential.

First off, Woody Allen. "Annie Hall" is one of my favorite movies. I've liked many other movies he's made: "Bananas, "Deconstructing Harry," a few others. But there comes a point at which his recycling of the same jokes, if not in words then in structure, delivery, and punchline, gets bothersome.

Here, his character exists largely to do Woody Allen improv. I don't think it counts as improv when you've been doing it for this long. It's like "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" -- it's not really improv when you're just making the same sex jokes with the same 3 people for years. It's repetitive and uninspired.

Then there's the rest of the movie. Scarlett Johansson is hot, sure. But I'm not sure she can act. She plays Diane Keaton in this movie, but not that well. Hugh Jackman plays a British guy. I thought he was Australian. If so, then he's at least trying out a different accent. Ian McShane tries to work with what he's given, and he has the role that could be the most fun, but there just isn't enough there to make it happen.

I tried to imagine what the movie would be like without Woody Allen's character. It'd be about 30 minutes long, first of all. Then, it'd be like a bad episode of a "Charmed," without the witchcraft or sisters. Is "Charmed" still on? That used to be a show M-N liked.

This movie just isn't good.

Movie Review: Curious George

Curious George: Torgo approves

So the little man had to go for a little operation yesterday, which meant that when we got home, it was a day for peaceful kid's movie watching. He doesn't watch much tv, but it can be one of the few things to make him sit quietly, which we needed him to do.

So aside from "Shrek," which we own and, speaking for the adults, had seen, we watched the "Curious George" movie. The boy loves that monkey.

When he was small(er), we got some of the original George books from the library. Wow, they're offensive. It's your typical "noble white man saves poor, ignorant creature from wilds of dark, dark Africa" story. It's overtly, horribly racist.

They managed to keep much of the story intact and lose most of the racism factor here. George follows the man onto his boat, he isn't "rescued." There is still a plot involving cultural pillaging, but it's less offensive than pretty much any Disney movie.

Will Ferrell plays the man in the yellow hat well. Drew Barrymore plays an excessively flirtatious, um, flirt -- that was weird, that's all she does in the movie. She shows up and flirts. Dick Van Dyke gets work as the museum owner. And David Cross is his maniacal son. (sidenote: what an odd world it'd be if David Cross was Dick Van Dyke's son. That's kind of like Johnny Knoxville being Bob Newhart's son.)

It's an entertaining little movie. I find something about George's endless mischief-making annoying, especially as he never learns anything. But it's amusing.

Visit SF for the scenery, stay for the Die-In

There was a 'Die-In' across the street from my office today. There are often protests and demonstrations there. This one featured a bunch of people lying on the ground for an hour, then marching, then getting arrested en masse. Plus, there was a big Ghandi puppet.

I wonder what happens to the puppet if the puppeteers get arrested. When they get out of jail, do they get to claim it? Is there a guy riding home from jail on the bus with a giant Ghandi?

Quote for today

I like quotes people put in email signatures. I used to always use one, but then I'd forget to unclick the box when I was sending something for which the quote was entirely inappropriate, so now by default I don't have one. Here's one from someone else:

"A ship in harbor is safe-
but that is not what ships are for."
-John A. Shedd

Movie Review: Stranger Than Fiction

Stranger Than Fiction: Torgo approves

Rainster just did a nice job with pros and cons in a movie review. Let me try that.

Pros:
1) In the "Eternal Sunshine," "I Heart Huckabees" mold, this movie is whimsical, offbeat, and not bound by any apparent rules.

2) Dustin Hoffman. I've said it before but it's worth repeating. He keeps taking fun roles and being interesting in them. His first scene here, he's going from one coffee cup to the next, drinking coffee while peeing, etc. It's subtle and hilarious.

3) The foreshadowing is restrained. You can begin to see where it's heading, especially with the random clips of two seeming non-characters. But it's not overdone.

4) Will Ferrell. He's good. Having heard there was buzz about big award nominations for him, well, I don't see that. But he is good.

Cons:
1) Maggie Gyllenhaal's character is, like the women in too many movies I've seen recently, a strong-willed, free-thinking woman who quickly crumbles and falls for a guy with little more going for him than a crush on her. This irks me. I mean, he's a boring IRS agent who's auditing her. She's a left-leaning hippie who owns her own business.

2) Queen Latifah. She irks me. I just don't think she can act. Granted, she doesn't have a role to play. Her dialogue is wooden on the page. But she brings nothing to it. I think she drags Emma Thompson down and I used to be smitten with Emma Thompson (up until around "Sense and Sensibility").

3) (don't read this if you haven't seen it) I don't buy it that Will Ferrell would say it's ok that he gets killed. I'm a writer. I love literature. I get sucked into stories when I already know how they end. Every time I read Romeo and Juliet I had idiotic hope that maybe this time they wouldn't both die in the end. But:

4) This isn't that good of a book. What's it about? Ok, we don't know. But we know the main character is this IRS agent with an incredibly boring life. Based on what happens in the movie (which is presumably near the end of the book), it's not that great.

Perhaps I'd have been more forgiving if we hadn't watched one of my favorite movies (The Big Lebowski) and one of M-N's favorites (Love and Basketball) over the weekend. They set a high bar. But I liked this movie.

It all comes back to the Monkees

So it turns out Brad Delp committed suicide. He was the lead singer of Boston. I never liked Boston. In fact, I actively disliked "More than a feeling."

Then I read that he sang in the Beatles tribute band called "Beatlejuice," which was based in Somerville, MA. I've seen this band. In 2001, the Monkees gave a free concert on the Esplanade, and Beatlejuice opened.

Cover bands occupy a strange, sad place in pop music. You need to be a competent musician, but not inherently talented or creative. No one really likes you, they just like the people you imitate.

The Monkees fall somewhere between a cover band and and actual band. They played some of their own songs, but the majority of their stuff was factory-produced. That 2001 concert was the second time I'd seen them. In 1987, I saw them in Milwaukee with "Weird Al" Yankovic opening. That was the first concert I'd been to. It was loud.

Sadly, some of the on-stage schtick by Davy Jones didn't change between 1987 and 2001.

Mike Nesmith, my favorite Monkee, wasn't at either concert. I don't think it's that he invested his money wisely. In fact, I don't think he did, not with his Monkees' money. But he made good choices afterwards, and his mom invented liquid paper, so he inherited that fortune.

It seems odd that of all the big-selling 60's groups, the Monkees are one of the only ones with all members still alive.

Caller ID: the devil's toy

When someone calls my office from my home number, the caller id shows the number and my name, which always freaks me out. How am I calling me? Why am I calling me?

Today, I was on the phone with someone when I see the caller id pop up with me. Then it goes away. Then I call again. Then it goes away. Then I call again.

Perhaps future me is trying to warn me of something. That's fantasy-Torgo thinking.

Reality-Torgo is thinking: boy injured, wife in labor, fire, osama bin laden, dick cheney, john walnuts mccain...

It was none of those. Really, the boy figured out the redial button. He likes buttons. Especially when they cause things to light up and make noise.

Old man's shameless playlist

So I'm getting old and decided to check my iTunes for the most played songs. This is my work computer, which has 2873 songs at the moment, far fewer than the home computer, and not the one we use with the iPod, and I leave it on shuffle a lot, so this is in no way representative of anything definitive. I was just curious.

1) Black Tambourine - Beck -- from Guero, an awesome album. Not the best song on there. But a good one.

2) Marker in the Sand - Pearl Jam -- from their newest. One of the first albums on the computer, hence the high play count. This is one of the best on the album. I sought this track out often.

3) Caramel - Suzanne Vega -- I've written before about my love for Ms. Vega. This is from Nine Objects of Desire, a great album from the Mitchell Froom era.

4) Be My Love - Cracker -- One of their best, I think. I like Big Dipper more. That's an amazing song. But this one's great.

5) 3 Speed - Eels -- I loved this song in college, but couldn't play it on the radio b/c of the f-word. I'm not sure why it's so high now, but I like it.

6) I Remember California - R.E.M. -- "Scrubs" last night, which is a show that's definitely getting tired, used R.E.M.'s Half a World Away, another awesome late-album track. Late on side 2, from the cassette days.

7) Strange Apparition - Beck -- from The Information. Not the best song, again, on the album, but a good one.

8) Giving Him Something He Can Feel - En Vogue -- This was originally from a movie that M-N likes, then En Vogue did the video based on that movie. I love this song. I'd forgotten about it for years, then rediscovered it when that movie was on tv.

9) Criminal - Fiona Apple -- Not my favorite Fiona Apple song. But I like most of her stuff.

10) Aurora - Foo Fighters -- Really? I don't remember hearing this that much. That's weird.

So the songs don't always make sense, but most of the artists do. I spend more time listening to Beck, Suzanne Vega, Pearl Jam, R.E.M., Cracker and Fiona Apple than just about anyone else these days. Weezer is up there, too. They had a few songs just not make the top 10.

Ok, that's enough of this.

Lost: still eh

Did you watch it last night? Slightly better. Still frustrating as hell. Locke? Are you that stupid? Rousseau? Have you really been living on this island? B/c you don't seem to know jack. Miss Klugh or Cleo or whatever her name is, don't you know that black people don't survive on this island? Why invite your own death? So Harold Perrineau and Walt sail away, Mr. Eko gets killed by smoke, Rose (and Bernard) have apparently be recast as Nikki and Paulo, and now she gets 1 minute of screen time, most of which is her getting killed.

And the ping pong subplot? Remember the subplot last year about looking for the frog? This is shamefully bad writing.

But Sayid is cool. A little too virtuous, especially for a guy who used to torture people.

Movie Review: This Film Is Not Yet Rated

This Film Is Not Yet Rated: Torgo approves

Having grown up as a movie junkie, this documentary didn't tell me much I didn't already know: the MPAA is a semi-fascist, completely unaccountable, industry-friendly sham. They abhor sex but have no problem with violence. They show strong tendencies towards misogyny, racism, homophobia. They, in short, suck.

But sometimes it's nice to have your beliefs reaffirmed.

Kirby Dick, in the playful, Michael Moore method, seeks to discover what this MPAA thing is and how they operate. It turns out, they don't want anyone to know.

There are good interviews with directors like Matt Stone, John Waters, Mary Harron, Kevin Smith and Kimberly Pierce. There's a deleted scene with the director of Love & Basketball that's worth seeing, too.

Everyone seems to be in agreement, the MPAA is bad. Dick does a good job of exposing precisely why and how they're bad. He shows clips of movies side by side, one that got an R, one that got an NC-17, wherein the shots are identical. He exposes the ratings board as not being parents of young children. And he documents the movie he's making being effectively censored by its target.

The double standard regarding sex and violence has always been troubling. Some of his interviewees hint at this, but I think it's definitely a larger, cultural problem that has always existed in the U.S. The Puritanical roots shun sex but condone and promote violence.

I think of how this has affected me. Through the movies, I have an extensive knowledge of things like weaponry and torture techniques. I watched ten minutes of a recent episode of "24" and learned how to extract information from someone using a power drill.

Meanwhile, sex was always something dirty and forbidden. Granted, I was raised Catholic. But shouldn't violence have been something dirty and forbidden?

No, I was terrified at a young age of garbage disposals, because of a horror movie commercial (I didn't even see the movie) in which someone gets sucked into one. Another movie's commercial showed a child's room with a lamp with a large pencil for a base. I had that lamp, but was always a little bit worried by it because it was associated with that movie. I saw a review of a Nightmare on Elm St movie on the midday news once in which they showed Freddy Krueger coming up through a waterbed. So I was scared of waterbeds. I think it was Critters in which a guy slept in his bed with his arm dangling over the side. There were Critters under the bed. I didn't let one finger go over the side of the bed for about a decade.

And I didn't even see any of those movies.

I was glad to hear that the MPAA was making some changes in response to this movie. It's nice to watch a documentary on dvd and, by the time it's on dvd, it's made parts of itself irrelevant. Not all, but parts. Slow progess.

Geico Cavemen + Burger King King = Funny t-shirt

I was Ethelbert's note about the Geico Cavemen getting a tv pilot and he mentioned that the Burger King King is getting a movie. So I went an looked that up, because that was news to me. But in doing so, I saw an ad for a funny t-shirt site. There's nothing I like more than funny t-shirt sites. This one made me laugh:


Ha ha ha. It still does. You know what doesn't? Typing "ha ha ha." That's just not funny.

I love the Geico cavemen. I know it's just a giant corporation's ad campaign, and I seem to get junk mail from Geico every other day even though I don't own a car, but I still think those commercials are awesome.

I used to not quite get Phil Hartman's Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer sketch on SNL. It's funnier to me in retrospect. But those Geico ads. That's funny.

I'm gonna come at you like a spider monkey. That's funny, too.

Iran? Really?

Well, this just doesn't make any sense.

Why would we do this? Ok, ok, I know. Iraq didn't make any sense. But if you look at the "Axis of Evil," it was the easiest of the three. And the whole 'flowers at their feet' thing, still waiting on that.

I'm not going to believe this until it happens. There's stupid. There's beyond stupid. Then there's invading Iran right now.

Book Report: Breakfast at Tiffany's

Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote: Torgo approves

I always try to find the cover of the edition I read for this blog. I was reading what was once my father's copy of this book, so it's about 40 years old. That copy has a sticker on it, just under the pic of Audrey Hepburn, that says "by the author of IN COLD BLOOD," which is true, but jarring.

I loved "In Cold Blood." I thought it was brilliant. I've never seen the movie of "Breakfast at Tiffany's," but while I believed it to be something far more mundane and trivial than what it is, the divide between this book and In Cold Blood is significant.

They're different in every possible way. But I don't want to go into all of that.

I was surprised at the casual racism of this book. So it's of a time when such racism was common, that doesn't excuse it. I think the book has dated badly, most notably on this topic.

It also reminds me of "Sneakers," which I just rewatched a week or so ago. That movie has dated badly because of its technology-based premise, set in 1992. Technology is proving to be more and more of a cultural barrier with each passing year. It's most apparent in works from 1945 to the present, I believe.

In "The Apartment," it was bizarre to see a huge office building where everyone's desks just had typewriters and rolodexes.

Ok, I'm getting sidetracked. This was a short book, a novella, I suppose, that I actually finished a week ago.

I approved the book b/c of Capote's writing style. He's a clever one. He effectively pulls the reader into the narrative. The story may be flimsy, but it's an easy read and it's not a burden to just keep going.

JetBlue comes through

I had to fly to Boston on something of a last minute business trip earlier this week. Tickets for flights were ridiculously high because, unlike other sales industries, airlines don't try to bargain with the customer to sell their last few products. Instead, they quadruple the price. What if supermarkets did that?

Well, this pound of chicken is normally $3 but because the "sell by" date is today, it's $45.

JetBlue is no exception. But they had one of the most reasonable fares. It was more inconvenient for me, because they don't start flying SF to BOS until May, so I had to go to Oakland. I decided it was worth it for the perks of JetBlue.

I know they completely broke down a couple of weeks ago, but I still like them. They have a consumer-oriented approach, much like Southwest (but w/o the cattle call seating).



Airline travel mostly sucks hard. The old airlines (like United, Delta, US Air, etc.) are terrible. I always hate flying with them.

But JetBlue has blue chips, free tv, and they don't make you feel like you're burdening them by riding on their planes. Sure, nobody serves food anymore, but on my flights, they were offering what they did have, chips, cookies, etc., constantly and in great numbers. And when the tv didn't work on my OAK to JFK leg, they gave me a $15 credit.

I'm now looking into flights for April. I don't get why some airline have tickets for $1000 or $1500 this far in advance. I looked on kayak.com and sidestep and figured those really expensive flights got me to Boston in 2 hrs instead of 5 or 6. But no. I'm not spending $1000, even if it's someone else's money, to spend 5 hrs cramped in a US Airways plane.

JetBlue has tickets for about $300-$350. That'll be fine.

Long after I stopped caring Ann Coulter exists...

...she goes and says this: "I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I — so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards."

I know Ann Coulter sells a few books here and there. I know tv shows like to have her on because she says ridiculous things like this and brings them ratings.

But I don't understand how she manages to be so incredibly soulless and horrid without reserve, conscience, or any apparent sense of decency. She makes Bill O'Reilly look like a cautious, tactful diplomat.