Stan Has Issues™ — Random Musings

Random Musings Archives

August 1, 2008

Bad Education

One principle of medieval warfare I’ve taken to heart is, “Know thy enemy.” Since I am a seething cauldron of hate, I’ve gotten to know quite a few people. Since the advent of Google (I’m no search-engine Johnny Come Lately, but in the pre-Google days, Internet-stalking was little more than a recipe for failure; say what you will about their indexing algorithms, they have hit the chewy nougat center of information-gathering for future serial killers) and the increased popularity of blogs and social networking sites, I’ve gotten to know more about certain enemies than I ever thought possible. I once found Owen’s DeviantArt page and, as such, was able to digest his alarming short stories. I’ve found more about The Manager than I ever thought possible. More importantly, I’ve dug deep into the world of the stupid blogger and have come out on the other side hating her more than ever.

One of her blog’s recurring statements: she teaches high school English to inner-city kids. She’s very proud of this, especially the “inner-city” part, because she thinks it gives her some kind of street cred or insight into this hoary netherworld. But here’s the recurring theme of these posts: she teaches very, very, very badly. She’s one of those people who will post excerpts of student work just to mock them, and not in a good-natured or loving way. (P.S.: she teaches them! isn’t the fact that they do so poorly at least a small reflection of her competence?) She’ll regale her captive audience with distressing stories about kids with serious psychological damage, structured as hilarious anecdotes about misplaced rage! But the absolute worst is when she basically comes out and says, “I have no interest in teaching these kids. I want to be a screenwriter, but teaching English in the inner-city was the only way I could get to L.A., so I guess I’ll have to put up with this miserable job.”

I know the following statement is, unfortunately, untrue, but this has always been my philosophy about teaching (whether it’s in public education or not): it’s a calling. You have to really want to teach these kids, you have to treat it as more than a job, because for a semester or year (or more), they’re the only guidance you have. You can justify it any way you want, but if you suck at your job or are thoroughly disinterested in it because you’re trying to pursue another career, that’s on you, not your students. You are officially a shitty teacher, and they have officially gotten a shitty education from you. Congratulations!

Over the years, I’ve had plenty of teachers who had failed to live their dreams. I had a few who genuinely wanted to be teachers. I had a few, especially the younger ones, who had that “checked-out” attitude of someone still trying to pursue an alternate career while “falling back” on teaching. Then there were the older ones who fell into teaching gigs by accident and wanted a place where they could drink on the job and collect a meager paycheck while doing as little as possible.

The only ones who had any impact were the older ones who once had dreams but had failed to achieve them; instead of growing old and bitter (like most of my college professors), these teachers poured all the energy they wished they could devote to their failed careers…into the classroom. They excited themselves about teaching a bunch of punk kids by looking through the prism of whatever they had failed to achieve — and through that, they somehow excited most of their students into learning.

So here we have the stupid blogger, in one of her many posts illustrating why she should not be allowed anywhere near a school, writing the following:

For the past two years I’ve had the same planning period - third. Third is the best planning period because it straddles our two lunch periods, so while everybody else gets 35 minutes to eat, I get two hours.

Has anyone else noticed where she went wrong? Here’s a hint: planning periods are for planning, not for extra-long lunches. This is the same person who has been known, on occasion, to gripe about — gasp! — her job encroaching on her free time, but when they are paying her to do that work, she elects to fuck off. Maybe this post, which explains her planning period has been moved to first, is some sort of punishment for, I dunno, taking two-hour lunches instead of using the planning period to do the work she’s paid to do.

She follows this up by saying the following:

She would just sleep in, except her school wisely docks her pay if she doesn’t punch in by a certain, pre-school-starting time.
Although she did start out using this planning period to do lesson-planning, handout-creating, and researching, that got boring! And she was oh so very tired!
So she started watching movies via Netflix’s instant video thingamadoo.
Oh, but she’s limited herself to documentaries, so that’s sort of like doing research.

She spends the rest of the post taking the “documentaries for research purposes” to its logical extreme, pretending that she has been using these documentaries all along to possibly show students while introducing concepts involving persuasive and expository writing. Believable! Especially the part about Super High Me, which is clearly something that could be shown in a public high school with no repercussions.

I’m a pretty spiteful guy. Maybe if I knew the stupid blogger in person and hated her, I’d try to semi-nonymously get her shitcanned. I’m actually tempted to do it anyway; her blog provides more than enough evidence to, at the very least, get her into assloads of trouble with her immediate superiors. But really, it’s not something to retaliate against. It’s something to mourn: a school teacher who devotes more time and energy to being a Hollywood nobody than to educating her students. It’s not bad to have dreams, but low-quality public-school teachers like this once again get me fist-shakingly mad at the state of education in this country. No child left behind…unless your teacher’s budding screenwriting career gets in the way!

Posted by Stan on August 1, 2008 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 28, 2008

Beat Mega Man

I would love to say I skipped a week of blogging because my quest to beat Mega Man had so consumed me that I sat in an obsessive daze, eyes glued to my old TV, as I endlessly and repetitively reset and played over and over and over until I crushed Dr. Wily like so many ants…

…in reality, I just beat it about five minutes ago, on a single playthrough (and a shitload of continues). The problems I had with the occasional, old-school NES freezing or the “didn’t quite blow on the cartridge hard enough” artifacting didn’t affect me this time, so I just kept going until I won, and let me tell you: Wily’s castle is fucking impossible, infinitely more difficult than the big man himself.

In fact, the reason/excuse for my absence goes a little something like this: I have a novel, and I want to be done with it. I want to be done with it so I can get the ball rolling on that fake publishing company idea and iron out all the difficulties. Look at the date on that post — it’s been over a year since I came up with the idea, and all this time I’m mainly dragging my feet because the fucking thing isn’t done. So now that things with The Big-Shot Producer have basically broken down, what am I left with? An inconsistent reader job, a drawer full scripts ranging from half- to whole-assed, and a novel that I poured — and continue to pour — far too much effort into, to make it the best thing it can possibly be.

It occurred to me that I’m past the halfway point on revising and editing the novel. It’s in better shape than I thought (there’s one major section that I will rewrite from scratch, but otherwise it’s all just nipping and tucking and proofreading), so I just wanted to keep going on it as much as possible. But something else — even stranger and, perhaps, even better — happened, something that’s never happened to me before with my own writing. Look, I wrote this novel from about November 2006 to January of 2007, and since then I’ve convinced myself I’ve been “rewriting,” even though I didn’t even look at it again until August of 2007, and then I got about a third of the way through before I got busy with work and screenplays and bullshit bullshit bullshit. So I put it aside again and picked it up in February of this year, started from the beginning, didn’t get much farther before The Big-Shot Producer came calling again, and I distracted myself with screenplays.

So I’m back on the novel, and it’s been so long since I’ve read anything beyond the first third that something miraculous and a little terrifying happened: I started to get really into the story. That’s not me trying to sound arrogant — believe me, I’m as surprised as anybody — but it shows me that I’ve written exactly the kind of novel that I like reading. Whether or not I’m the only one remains to be seen, but at the very least I can feel confident that I’ve written the very best novel I can.

I don’t know if the ruse will work or what will happen once I finish. I’m just glad it’s working.

Posted by Stan on July 28, 2008 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 9, 2008

Beggin’

So I got a professionally printed brochure from my alma mater…

…begging me to donate money.

Hey, here’s an idea! Maybe, when begging for money, you could try showing that you aren’t wasting money on full-color brochures by just sending me a sheet of standard white paper with a form letter? I still won’t donate money, but at least I’d feel a little guilty.

(And let’s not even get into the fact that I’m unemployed — I don’t blame the college for that, but their “job-placement program” isn’t exactly coming through with any hot leads.)

Posted by Stan on June 9, 2008 4:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 19, 2008

The Folly of MySpace

Or, more accurately, a folly of MySpace…

So I’m doing this project that doesn’t quite necessitate the development of dozens of MySpace pages for fictional characters, but I swear to you it actually helps me with developing characters. There’s something very personal in the way people customize MySpace profile pages into eye-bleeding messes. I’ll never forget the guy I worked with, who seemed reasonably nice and good-humored. His MySpace page reminded me of trips into Vincent D’Onofrio’s mind in The Cell, and after that, being around him made me feel uncomfortable. Besides which, with all the questions and free surveys and shit, it forces you to answer questions about characters that Lajos Egrei would never think of. “Coke or Pepsi”? I mean, part of me says, “Who gives a shit?” but another part of me thinks, in some way, that is important. It’s like the cut scene from Pulp Fiction where Mia Wallace deconstructs the personality type of an Elvis man versus a Beatles man.

I ran into a little snafu with my latest creation. Admittedly, it’s my own fuck-up, but it speaks volumes about MySpace’s half-assedness. It goes like this: I created a new account, but I misspelled the e-mail address. I don’t do this often, but I guess it’s kind of difficult to spell “girthmcdurchstein,” which is why I should probably just use Gmail for all these fake addresses.

I figured: okay, not hard. I’ll just go to my account settings and change the e-mail address. It’ll send a confirmation e-mail to the new address, and that’ll be that. Right?

Wrong. MySpace sends the confirmation to the old e-mail address, which I’ll admit makes some sense — you could easily hijack someone’s account and change their address — but in the case of someone trying to change an e-mail address that doesn’t exist, it makes things a little more difficult. So I say, “Fuck it, I’ll just cancel the account and start from scratch.” Again, MySpace sends a confirmation e-mail and will not cancel the account unless you confirm it.

At this point, you might be wondering why I didn’t just abandon the profile. It’s a brand new, friendless, shapeless account. Well, I had stupidly already filled in the MySpace URL for it, and I wanted to keep it. Besides which, I figured it couldn’t be that difficult to change the e-mail address.

Wrong. They have a thing on their FAQ telling you how to change your e-mail address if you don’t have access to the old one. It was simple: fill out a form with your old e-mail, account password, new e-mail, and an explanatory note (if necessary). Not hard.

Wrong. When I clicked SEND, MySpace told me all further correspondence would be sent to the old, nonexistent e-mail address. Keep in mind that this form specifically exists to change your e-mail address when you don’t have access to the old one. So fine, I redid the exact same form, only this time I put the real e-mail address in for both, with an explanatory note giving them the old one but telling them why I didn’t use it.

Within an hour, they sent me an autogenerated e-mail re-explaining what I had just done and telling me to do the exact same thing again, only this time I just had to hit reply and type out all the info.

I didn’t hear a thing for five days. After Googling around, I found two good solutions:

Send them another e-mail saying something like “FIFTH ATTEMPT” in the subject line.
Post a pornographic image as a comment on Tom’s profile, which will ensured your account gets deleted within minutes.

What the hell kind of system do they have where it’s easier just to get banned than it is to legitimately cancel your account or change your e-mail address?

Anyway, I took the former option (saving for the latter if it doesn’t work) and decided to put FIFTH ATTEMPT, even though it wasn’t. It took another full day before I received a response, another autogenerated e-mail that elaborates on what the FAQ says, telling me to create a “salute” with MYSPACE.COM and my Friend ID written on it.

This makes no sense. In every defense of MySpace’s ass-backwards system I’ve read, they say MySpace makes you go through all this annoyance and bother for security purposes. Like I said, it’s pretty easy to hijack the account, change to a different e-mail address the person you hijacked won’t know, and fuck up their profile. So all you have to do is send in your parents’ brains or write BRAINS on a 3x5 index card, and they give you the keys to the kingdom? How is this secure? Obviously the person hijacking the account knows it’s a MySpace account, so they have one half of the “salute” covered. Even if they couldn’t figure out how to find the Friend ID, it explains to you how to do this right there in the e-mail.

This can’t be a “security feature.” A security feature is popping up a “secret question” when you want to change your e-mail address or password — something a little harder to know than somebody’s e-mail address and current password. It doesn’t even make sense when you say “you have to take a picture of yourself holding it,” because how the fuck does MySpace know what you look like? Especially, like in my case, when you’ve uploaded no photos.

Fuck, with all this hassle — and I still haven’t received an e-mail saying my “salute” is good enough — I might as well just porn-spam Tom.

Or, you know, stop making MySpace pages for every half-assed character I create. But hey, I spent too much time Photoshopping images and uploading videos to quit now! The only thing it’s taught me is to be more careful when I type in the e-mail address upon signing up. Or to not do the perma-URL until I’ve validated my e-mail address (which they shouldn’t let you do, anyway).

Posted by Stan on May 19, 2008 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 15, 2008

Kar Komedy Klassics

I got a coupon from my mechanic for a “free 24-point inspection” that just happened to coincide with my oil light randomly popping on. The oil light popping on is typically seen as a bad sign, but I hadn’t experienced any trouble and couldn’t figure out what the stupid problem was. The only problem I noticed in my car was what I thought were failing shock absorbers, which I thought may have contributed to whatever problem my car was experienced.

So I took my car in for the inspection. My mechanic is a kindly old Italian guy who always says things like, “We gonna fix-a you up-a good, Mister Stan.” He usually does, and he’s pretty much the only mechanic I’ve dealt with who’s actually honest. I mean, the free inspection is an obvious “bring them in for free, then charge them an assload on unnecessary repairs” ruse, but he said, “The car’s-a fine, you just-a need a new oil pressure switch.” Since those are cheap and not labor-intensive, I had him do it.

When I got the car this morning, it turns out he did a little something extra. A bolt in the driver seat loosened at some point last year. I couldn’t figure out where the loose one was, so I never tightened it, but it basically caused my seat to flop around. It was at this point that I noticed the failing shocks — every little bump seemed tremendous, and I thought maybe the bad shocks caused the seat to loosen in the first place.

Here’s why I’m stupid. My mechanic tightened the seat, and mysteriously the shock problems went away. Yeah, I’m sure you’ve already done two and two on that one and realized I’m dumb as a fucking rock.

Posted by Stan on May 15, 2008 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 14, 2008

“You Look Good…”

I don’t have what you’d call an “exercise regimen” because I am what you’d call “extremely lazy.” Despite my penchant for donuts and pizza, I kept in reasonably good shape (for me) by walking about five miles a day, plus walking up and down no fewer than 480,000 flights of stairs (per day) in various buildings, el stations, bookstores, libraries, etc. I actually did this intentionally: if a building had an elevator and wasn’t more than 10 floors, I’d take the stairs. If it had an escalator and immobile stairs, I’d choose the latter; if it had just an escalator, I’d try my damndest to not stand and let the moving stairs do their work for me. (Sometimes, during rush hour, it’s impossible to walk up an escalator.) There was also a brief period when I lifted weights, under the impression that it would help me play guitar better. (It actually kinda did, taking me from “sloe jam” to “Hammett-style tapsanity,” before I got lazy and went back to “sloe jam.” I like to tell people I’m feeling the music, but really I’m feeling the unwillingness to learn overcomplicated guitar solos.)

Since college, I’ve continued the trend of lazy-man exercise by walking anywhere from three to five miles a day. It’s not as arduous or as fun, nor does it have the additional stair-stepping challenge of the Loop, but at least it’s something. I used to go biking, but for some reason (likely fatness) my ass no longer cooperates with the seat. It creates a numbing sensation on my tender vittles, which isn’t a problem until the pins and needles set in. Just imagine that for a few seconds, you men out there, and you’ll know why I gave up biking (even though it’s the only non-sexual or -competitive-eating physical activity I enjoy).

At this point, the walking routine didn’t really do anything except keep me from gaining weight. I figured as long as I held steady at “slightly overweight,” I’d be cool.

Unfortunately, my lifetime of horrible eating habits and not-quite-lifetime of caffeine over-consumption (plus some bad karma thrown in for good measure) have left my gastrointestinal tract ravaged with an unknown disease that has baffled at least one discompassionate, House-like gastroenterologist. (It’s my belief that House has ruined all medical specialists because it allows them to put a doctor’s natural god complex into overdrive — he’s supposed to be an antihero, not a hero hero.) As a result, I’ve had little recourse but to enjoy a special diet that consists of:

White rice
White bread
Egg whites* (sensing a theme?)
Steamed vegetables that are green and leafy
Unseasoned, boneless, fat-less chicken
Applesauce
Unsalted pretzels (in moderation)
Honey graham crackers (also in moderation)

Those fascinated with bowel movements will want to check out what I’ve been producing lately.

It’s actually not as bad as one might think. There’s at least a little room for variety, I haven’t suffered the constant heartburn and lethargy associated with “eating three-fourths of an extra-large pizza by yourself in one sitting,” and I’ve lost about 35 pounds, taking me from “slightly overweight” to “still slightly overweight, but not as much.”

So while out on my morning walk, a plump, middle-aged woman stepped out on her front porch, then walked down to the end of her driveway. (I was walking in the street.) I didn’t pay her much mind, figuring she was just going to her mailbox. Then I realized there was no mailbox at the end of her driveway. Also that she was staring at me.

“You look good,” she said when I was within earshot.

I pointed at myself in confusion, despite nobody else being around.

“Yeah,” she said. “I seen you walking, and before you was real…” I guess she didn’t want to say “fat,” but she did the universal body-language for fat: ballooning her cheeks out and crooking her arms into a wide, semicircular silhouette of a huge body. This was actually kinda more insulting than if she’d just said it, but maybe she didn’t think it was so bad considering she’s way fatter than I’ve ever been. “But now, you look good.”

“Well, uh…thanks,” I said.

“So this is just from walking?”

I didn’t want to go into my digestive problems or the new diet, so I just said, “Yeah.”

“How far?”

“Eh, about three miles,” I said, referring to my regular route. I have alternate routes that spread it out to five or six, depending on if I have a particular destination.

“Wow,” she said, as if this was a truly amazing feat.

“Yeah,” I grunted.

“Well, I just wanted to tell you I been watching you, and it shows.”

Poorly phrased, but I assume/hope she meant “I’ve been watching you walk, and the weight-loss shows.” Otherwise, it takes on a disturbing, restraining-order-worthy connotation.

“Thanks,” I repeated. Then, she crossed the street to a Comcast truck that was, apparently, servicing her house. Or something. I don’t really know why she did that. I just kept walking.

* I mistakenly typed “Egg shites.” That about sums it up.

Posted by Stan on May 14, 2008 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 6, 2008

MySpace Blog “Customization”

MySpace, a place for friends, is once again the bane of my existence. I’m going to try to stop making every other entry about my other blog, because I’m honestly not trying to pimp it here (if I was, there’d be endless links on the sidebar), but this is where I go to vent, and I need to vent right about now.

I spent most of the evening fighting to the death with MySpace’s “blog customization” panel. Until recently, the profile part of MySpace had no options for customization — it was only through “third-party” hacking that people were able to override MySpace’s bland, unattractive default settings. However, for as long as I’ve used it (since late 2005), the blog has had customization options: a list of options to specify font, size, color, alignment, with a little textarea at the bottom to paste in your own CSS code.

I had a new idea for the MySpace blog. Because, see, I have the other blog, but then I want to update the MySpace blog, as well, because — among other things — MySpace has implemented goofy status feeds (not unlike Facebook) that will tell MySpace users when I’ve posted a new blog. However, I’m lazy, and even as “customizable” as a MySpace blog can get, it’s still pretty fucking ugly. Besides which, I can’t pimp the site that way. So I figured the smartest thing to do would be to imitate the way the main page of the real blog is right now — the entry excerpt, followed by a link to the full blog post, which will take them to the site. It seemed like such an easy task.

My first plan had virtually nothing to do with CSS or anything. It seems like the most logical thing in the world for me to use MySpace as an syndicator for my blog. I post once, MovableType generates a special feed, pings MySpace, then MySpace posts it. That’d work really well if MySpace was set up that way! It’s…not. Not even close. If you’re asking why I, in my quest to ease laziness, don’t use MySpace’s RSS feed and syndicate that on my MovableType blog (which has the technology), the answer is simple: MySpace sucks ass. In the same way it can’t syndicate, it can’t utilize certain MovableType features that I want.

So I spent far too long working up a custom stylesheet. It shouldn’t have been difficult: specify the text, the link colors, the custom header/footer sizes/alignments that I use — so damn easy, right? Wrong.

Here’s how MySpace would work in a perfect world: you paste something — anything — into the CSS textarea, and it removes MySpace’s default CSS code. If you fuck everything up and it’s a total disaster, just delete your stylesheet and the old stuff comes back. Seems reasonable, right?! A little hot if->else action, and we know how much MySpace loves overscripting every little thing — they can’t lose.

Well, they don’t do it that way. You have to override every single fucking thing on their CSS, or else it gets confused. Even then, it gets a little hairy. All I wanted to specify for the links were colors; MySpace lists font-size. Why?! I have variable font-sizes, so the problem I ran into initially is that the colors worked fine, but every link — no matter what other specifications were there — appeared with the same font-size. I’m not an expert on web design, as anyone who has visited one of my many sites will attest, so I don’t know of any magical CSS command that will specify to override a set-in-stone font-size with a variable. I am pretty sure h3, it does nothing but the browser default. you type it in as its own p class, and it works fine. What the fuck?

So fine, I settled on creating different classes for every single fucking thing on the blog. Which worked, but now the only way I can easily copy and paste is to have MovableType generation a dummied-up text file with all these magical new classes. So once again, MovableType swoops in to save the day.

And all this because I want the 14 MySpace friends I have who aren’t bots or fictional characters to know when I’ve posted a blog. What a waste of time and energy.

Posted by Stan on May 6, 2008 10:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 1, 2008

Twittered

More Diablo Cody rage:

http://twitter.com/diablocody

It seemed pretty innocuous at first, until I stumbled across one Twitter:

I just bought an amazing dress for my girl Dana’s premiere tomorrow. I am SO gonna get Fugged!

Not that it’s without precedent, but it just bugs me. Really, the Fug girls are going to follow her around, Fugging her constantly? She’s that important a person, that edgy and interesting in her apparel choices? Maybe she wore a hideous Pebbles Flintstone dress to the Oscars, but it doesn’t quite count if you’re expecting to get Fugged — practically goading them into it. It’s just another example of someone thinking highly of themselves while pretending they don’t think highly of themselves. You want to have a colossal ego? Have a colossal ego, and be upfront about it. Aaron Sorkin does a really nice job showing his off. You want to be known as “Oscar-winning* screenwriter” instead of “former stripper”? Well, the first step is to write a good screenplay, but once you’ve done that, maybe try hiring a publicist who will force the media to downplay the stripper connection, now that it no longer suits your purposes. Turning your back on what helped you broke through to mainstream success will be sure to give you indie cred!

*Still makes me shudder.

Posted by Stan on May 1, 2008 6:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 29, 2008

Fuck Free Shit

Remember how I was going to score a free copy of a certain highly anticipated video game that comes out tomorrow? Yeah, I never heard back. I don’t know if the PR lady didn’t like my bullshit excuse for an article, or if she (rightly) flagged us as a fly-by-night operation desperate to get our hands on free shit, but the game’s out tomorrow. Or maybe she’s just not too worried about me running the article on launch day. It seems like most “early reviews” have exclusivity/fawning rights, while everyone else will have to make do with scraps later on.

My Amazon preorder shipped. I just hope, if the PR lady does decide to send a copy, it doesn’t have NOT FOR RESALE stamped all over it like most freebies, so I can return it to Amazon.

Posted by Stan on April 29, 2008 3:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 25, 2008

Scoring Free Shit

I spent part of today trying to score a free copy of a certain upcoming video game that I am looking forward to more than any person should. Apparently a PR firm contacted a website I’m working on, even though we’re a film review site, to let us know we can contact them for hi-res graphics to promote the launch. The publisher forwarded it to me, telling me he’d help me score a free copy if possible. I said, “Awesome,” because even though I preordered it, I don’t technically have the money (whoo credit!). So I got a polite e-mail from somebody at the PR place asking me about the nature of my story, so she can help to better accommodate me.

Uh-oh.

Some quick thinking led me to the realization that a good, film-related article could be culled from the very notion that video games are becoming increasingly cinematic; beyond this, the series has been known for movie references and parodies. I could write a decent comparative article about the games, their influences, and whether or not a video game can capture the same emotional depth as a film. (P.S.: They can.)

No word yet on whether or not that’s good, but considering the impromptu nature of this B.S., I am feeling pretty good about my skills. I’m ready for grad school!

Posted by Stan on April 25, 2008 3:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 23, 2008

Banning People from the Internet

Remember this lady? Here’s the disconnect, for me: first, on the Lee Stranahan blog, she refuses to post a link to her own blog. After first accusing commenters of being ridiculous by destroying his bandwidth and leaving trolling comments, fair points both of them, some folks asked for a link to her own blog, so we could take it over there, but she said no. It’s a private blog, invitation-only (Blogger’s stupidest feature, if you ask me; if you aren’t going to let it all hang out for the Internet masses, why blog at all?).

So, with a baffling two-day roll-out, she decided yes, she’d make a public blog — specifically designed for readers both of Stranahan and Bitter But Brilliant. She started by posting about 20 things in less than two days. Many of the early entries were clearly copied and pasted from another place (ostensibly her private blog); later, she took it upon herself to troll BBB posters (including yours truly) using the blog, since they banned her from the forum.

After checking out that trainwreck several times last weekend, it suddenly prompted me to sign in so I could view the private blog. That’s right: she privatized another blog. Which begs the question: what’s the point? You have two blogs, one public and one private. Ill-advised though it was, I suppose the point of the public blog was so that we could get to know her in order to stop mocking her. I don’t claim to know that for sure, but it did seem like the sampling of entries were selected to ingratiate her. It didn’t work, so why not just delete the blog? Do you really need two private blogs? After that, do you need to roll out yet another public blog, this one with comments disabled? You couldn’t have just disabled comments on the other one? Maybe she’s just not Internet savvy, but it seems like excess.

It started to make me wonder: should the Internet have some kind of Logan’s Run-esque rule where anyone over a certain age isn’t allowed to go online? Since it seems she’s devoted her life to trolling message boards and creating unnecessary blogs, that’s a tax on bandwidth that nobody really needs. I suppose this rule should also apply to younger people, as well. What I’m saying is, only people between the ages of 22 and 35 are allowed on the Internet. Sorry, pervs, find another outlet.

Posted by Stan on April 23, 2008 3:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 20, 2008

One of Many Stupid Conclusions I’ve Leaped To

As a lad, I would often see a Charles Bronson movie called Telefon listed in The Cable Guide (yes, this was back in that frightening time before TV Guide covered cable networks), often playing in the middle of the night on HBO. It had a little logline boiling down its complex plot into one sentence. For many years, I thought the word “telethon” was actually “telefon” and that this Bronson movie uncovered some kind of grand conspiracy funneling telethon donations to dirty Reds. In my defense, I was young and pretty stupid.

Posted by Stan on April 20, 2008 3:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 16, 2008

Marketing Insanity

I won’t deny checking out Diablo Cody’s MySpace blog, at first for more fodder in my crusade against her career, and boy does she ever disappoint. Like 90% of blogs on the Internet, it’s a haphazard assortment of embedded YouTube videos, links to shit nobody cares about (but the comment sycophants sure fake it well!), mildly interesting anecdotes, and pop-culture vomit. I lost interest shortly after she stopped making disingenuous self-effacing remarks around Oscar time, but I still keep checking it…because of Rodney.

I don’t know what to make of Rodney. I’m fascinated in a trainwreck kind of way, because I can’t seem to figure out what’s happening with his blog and MySpace page [the link’s broken, but I included it on the off-chance it returns]. Sometimes, it feels like an elaborate prank/self-promotion, not unlike what I’ve attempted (and failed at — clearly raging insanity is more entertaining than incest jokes and Skip Press parodies). Other times, it feels 100% legit.

When I first started looking at the comments on Cody’s blog, Rodney’s stood out. Not strictly because of the total insanity — just because his comments almost never had a thing to do with the actual content of Cody’s posts, or any of the other comments. It sort of reminded me of The Onion’s “Ask…” columns, where you have the standard “Dear Abby” questions with totally unrelated answers. Even then, I didn’t notice Rodney too much at first…

…until the stalking started.

If you follow the link to Rodney’s blog, the early posts detail a film allegedly based on the life of his (ex?-)girlfriend. The last post on his blog chronicles stalking/death threats/etc. against the girlfriend and himself. He pastes everything in there — text messages, e-mails, whatever — and for some reason attributes it to a psychiatrist. He left several comments on Cody’s blog flat-out stating the man lost his medical license because he sexually abused patients, but in blog posts on his MySpace page (now removed), he elaborated that the shrink lost his license for alcoholism, but because of the graphic nature of the text messages, Rodney assumes alcoholism is a smokescreen.

(On a semi-related note, after reading through all the messages, I can’t figure out how they narrowed it down to this guy — who is a real, Googleable person — when it could be any random person. The dude posts his e-mail address, websites, and phone number all over the place.)

Most people on Cody’s blog just ignored him, until last night. He received two responses — both from the same person — chiding Rodney for posting such depressing, crazy stuff in a place she visits for joy and happiness. Fair enough, but I should also mention that yesterday’s comment included a very specific reference to murdering this psychiatrist, which apparently resulted in MySpace banning his account.

Since MySpace is terrible, I have to assume Rodney’s space received specific complaints in order for this ban to take place. On MySpace, my fictional characters have made extensive references to committing murder, jailbreaks, incest, and pedophilia — and my account was only banned once. For using a bot. (Even though I state it was because of this map for street cred. Buy the t-shirt!)

Whatever happened, I still find myself puzzling over what Rodney is really up to: crazy and crying out for help, crafty and marketing himself, or maybe a little of both. I guess “a little of both” could explain why he’s marketing himself in the most alarming, misguided possible ways. This whole thing is fascinating, and I’m disappointed he’s been cut off from MySpace. Hopefully he’ll pop up again soon, or make better use of his Blogger account…

Posted by Stan on April 16, 2008 9:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 14, 2008

Television Without Purpose

I don’t visit many Internet message boards anymore because, as I failed to mention the other day, message boards are just too time-consuming, especially if you participate. The few I look at, I don’t read regularly, and I participate even less frequently. But there was a time, when I was working one of my many dead-end jobs and had assloads of time to kill, where I became obsessed with a website called Television Without Pity. For those who aren’t aware (because you have better things to do with your lives than obsess over TV), it’s a site where folks write long, snarky recaps of television shows. At their best, they approximate the experience of watching a show, simulating the things that run through your mind so you can say, “Thank God I’m not the only one who didn’t think a single moment of 24’s fourth season made sense.” At their worst, they descend into rambling, pseudo-intellectual garbage overanalyzing the kind of reality shows most people half-watch as they do laundry or cook dinner.

And then there are the forums. I’ll get to that later. First, a little personal history…

I read the recaps on that site off and on from around 2001 through…well, pretty much through the recent Bravo buyout. My reading the recaps isn’t some kind of anti-corporate protest so much as a result of the shake-ups and new features really sucking up the site. The only idea worse than recapping sitcoms was the plan for “weecaps,” which aren’t defined by brevity (as you’d think, with the name) but by turnaround time. As a result, normally entertaining recappers deliver barely-coherent, joke-free summaries that are roughly as long as normal recaps.

Although I had read the recaps on the site for awhile, the forums were barely a blip on my radar until the fall of 2005. At the time, I was working at a tech company I’ve taken to calling Motorama on this blog (to make it harder to Google) that had a metric shit-ton of downtime. Even taking my now-legendary three-hour lunches, rolling in around an hour late and leaving an hour two early…I still had about four hours of downtime, because I was an efficient worker in a department notorious for inefficiency. Good times!

Also at the time, Lost launched its second season with one of the greatest mindfucks in the history of television. It was this that drew me to the TWoP forums. Well, also the fact that the color scheme of the Lost forums approximated the proprietary software we used…and also the fact that the show’s massive popularity at that time caused threads to balloon to hundreds of pages within days of an episode airing. (For a frame of reference, many other shows I watched at the time had episode threads that would rarely get to 20 pages in a full week.)

I was addicted to uncovering easter eggs and secrets, which was hard to do since ABC didn’t even carry HD feeds (or maybe it was just my cable company) at that time. As weeks passed, it became even harder because the vocal minority of Lost haters infested every thread — not just containing themselves to the show’s official bitterness thread — and this, almost as quickly as my addiction started, is what started to frustrate me about TWoP’s forums. Were all posters this obnoxious? Were they all unaware that most TVs can change channels? When they kept complaining that Lost defied its premise (and promise) by veering in a sci-fi direction, did they not noticed that the first episode featured a dinosaur-like monster that could uproot trees but was apparently invisible? Did they all hole up in threads that acted largely as echo chambers, causing their rage to increase to such a point that, by the end of season two, bitterness posters were making up their own, 100% untrue storylines, then getting mad at the writers for plot twists that…never happened.

As I started to have issues with the forums, I also noticed what I perceived as a sharp decline in the quality of recaps. (Turns out, I was just reading more of them, and the overall site quality was not nearly as good as the limited sampling I’d had before. I didn’t know this at the time.) Randomly, I popped “twop sucks” into Google just to see if anyone on the planet agreed with me. Because of the way the forum is modded, you can’t find any actual criticism of the site, or any of its posters, anywhere on their boards. You have to go to outside sources, and fortunately for me, the first hit was an anti-TWoP forum (conveniently named “TWoP Sucks”).

There, I discovered a smallish group of people who didn’t necessarily hate the site — if they did, unlike Lost viewers, they’d stop looking at — but needed to vent frustrations about unsavory posters, inconsistent moderation, and other general site weirdness. I quickly learned much more about the history of the site (in particular the forums and mods) than I ever wanted to know, but I stuck around because, although I posted infrequently, the folks there were…surprisingly normal and down-to-earth. Even their disdain for certain posters felt like typical vent-and-move-on behavior, not the rabid fandom (or anti-fandom) so often expressed on a website devoted to saying they are not a fan site.

So last year, Bravo bought TWoP for mysterious reasons. Since the site actually had some money, they hired part-time mods so the roster of recappers could do disappointing work recapping sitcoms. (Seriously, at this point M. Giant’s 24 recaps are the only things I’ll read on the site, but they should not have made him recap The Office. Much as I like him, recapping a sitcom is even worse than someone trying to retell a really good joke — it’s like someone standing next to a guy telling a really good joke, then getting flustered and trying to outdo him and failing.) With new people devoted exclusively to modding, you’d think it’d get more consistent. But no — it’s pretty much the same old shit (some would argue it’s worse). You have the mods who are fair and reasonable, the mods who strictly enforce the rules no matter what, the mods who enforce the rules inconsistently based on whether or not they agree with the offending poster, and the weird, overzealous mods who will just ban on a whim and make up an appropriate rule violation.

Which leads me, at long last to this post with a reasonable, if slightly bitter, account of getting banned from TWoP. The real fun is in the comments section. If you ignore the misguided conspiracy theories and tales of similar woe and bitterness, you’ll get to a comment that’s both sad and hilarious, in which a 61-year-old retiree was first warned, then banned for improper capitalization (ironically, she was a schoolteacher). If you keep going, you’ll find another comment in which she explains that she took the time to get the runaround from various employees of Bravo/NBC/Universal, going all the way up the chain of command to Jeff Zucker.

Because she was banned from an Internet message board. For a legitimate violation of the rules.*

Eventually, an employee of NBC (followed by a former employee) jumped on to mention that it’s both insane and hilarious to believe anybody with any kind of authority cares. This launched a bout of insanity that has resulted in, quite possibly, more traffic and comments than the poor blogger has ever received. I admit, the whole thing is hilarious, especially when it spilled over to TWoP Sucks (now known as Bitter But Brilliant) and, back on the blog, a sock puppet joined the original commenter in defense that she admitted, eventually, was being dictated to her by the original commenter. (Even funnier, I just noticed now, after pasting all these links to the comments, that the original post was written in November.)

I think the whole thing reached such a nadir of stupidity that it went from weird-yet-sad to flat-out funny, around the time somebody asked why she didn’t just re-register, and the commenter’s sock puppet answered with a paranoid (and untrue) conspiracy theory that mods obsessively check every username and e-mail address that registers to the site for superficial similarities to posters they’ve already banned.

I’m often attracted to the lurid wreckage of Internet strangeness, but I’m still just baffled by the crusade of a woman who was actually banned for the right reasons.** Her obstinate unwillingness to admit any wrongdoing kind of makes you realize that she’s exactly the type of person who would get warned once, ignore it, get warned a second time, ignore it, and then act shocked and outraged when she’s banned on the third offense. Why do so many people who gravitate to TWoP have such an utter lack of self-awareness?

More importantly: what does that say about me?***

*Say what you will about the rules and the fascist mods, their rules about spelling/grammar/capitalization make the forums much easier to read, and when you’re warned twice, why would a banning shock you?

**Although lack of capitalization is a pretty minor offense compared to the behavior of others the site hasn’t banned, it’s one of their most clearly stated rules.

***Hey, wait. That’s sort of like self-awareness.

Posted by Stan on April 14, 2008 5:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 12, 2008

Prove It All Night

I mentioned a few days ago that I sometimes lurk around misc.writing.screenplays (actually, now I stick with the moderated group), just to see what’s going on. I don’t have much interest in posting, and it’s easy to check in once a month and read all the worthwhile posts in maybe half an hour. They really don’t talk much about writing except to newbies, which is fine, except when they get distracted by politics, which they do. A lot. It makes it a chore to read unless you just skip those threads. I’m all for political discourse, but I’ve been lurking and (very rarely) posting there since around 2001, and it all comes down to: same shit, different day. It’s reached a point where I can’t figure out why posters allow their buttons to be pushed, or derive pleasure in pushing the buttons of the others, because it’s always the same argument.

The trolls are the same way, and in the thread I’m about to discuss, that was even mentioned, although ironically I feel like the poster is one of the rare non-trolls. He’s just very misguided, confused, and ill-informed. Whether they’re trolls or not, the usual pattern with newbies goes like this:

Newbies leap onto the group, excited to learn about the wonderful world of screenwriting.

Veteran posters respond with encouragement, recommending resource books and websites where produced scripts can be download.

Newbie trades excitement for bravado, something along the lines of, “With these tools, I will write the greatest screenplay in history and everyone in Hollywood will want a piece of me. I’ll be the next [Shane Black/Charlie Kaufman/(shudder) Diablo Cody]!”

Regulars scale back their encouragement, deciding the newbie is now ready to learn the harsh realities of the screenwriting trade.

Newbie gets defensive, insists that they’re all a bunch of cynical losers (most often citing lack of screen credits or lack of screen credits on good movies) and they shouldn’t try dragging him down with them.

Regulars come to mild defense of themselves or each other and/or shrug things off, saying something like, “I don’t have to defend my credits to you. The fact that you think the finished product resembles my original idea shows how little you know about the business.”

Here is the most irregular part; most often, the newbies simply give up posting. (In my check-in six weeks ago, one of them actually had the gall to suggest that the reason they can’t get new blood on the group is because Usenet is dying. Usenet as a discussion medium is dying — but that ain’t the reason newbies don’t stick around.) Sometimes, though, the newbies get more aggressive, resorting to personal attacks, which are easy to do considering the whole group operates like LiveJournal comments, with little rhyme or reason to the discussion. It’s all personal whims, inside jokes, anecdotes, and other odds and ends that can formulate an incomplete but still attackable personality profile. Even rarer — but far more entertainingly — the newbie trolls with wild abandon, going insane and bringing in sock puppets. Amazingly, the regulars usually go for this, arguing and fighting (even as others try to point out these guys are shams). In accordance with cliché, it’s only when they ignore the troll that he goes away.

Two of my favorite troll stories: My all-time favorite was some craziness involving a guy calling himself Eric James Niemi, apparently a real guy who sold a script in 2001. The poster was clearly not the guy, but the dude went insane and just flamed everyone for several months, increasing in complexity and absurdity, almost the point where it seemed like a satire of Usenet trolling. I checked out of the group before it was resolved, so I’m not sure how it ended, but intrepid readers can check out Google Groups if they want to see some of the hilarity in action.

Another good one was more recent, with a guy (likely a bottom-rung intern, reader, or assistant) who got ahold of the screenplay for The Bucket List a few days before the sale was announced. He posted it on the group, claiming he wrote it and looking for feedback. This was actually a great example of trolling, because the guy only wrote the initial post, then stepped back and watched the chaos. While it’s true that many accused him of being a fraud, and he did begin trolling them, about 80% of the Bucket List fiasco revolved around regulars who loved the script versus regulars who hated it; the former justified their love by pointing out its high-profile sale and the attention it received from top-notch Hollywoodites, while the latter argued that all that’s meaningless because more goes into a decision than whether or not the script is brilliant.

So here comes the newest “troll,” a fellow posting under the innocuous pseudonym “studio.” He says he has a screenplay idea involving all of the following:

A high-profile true story that will (for reasons he won’t discuss) require what sounds like Babe-esque “realistic” animation for talking animals.

The story has already been made into an obscure movie (currently available only on VHS), but because it’s both true and because the movie concentrated on…well, I’m not sure what “studio” meant by this, but what I got out of it is that he wants to write about a character involved in this bigger, high-profile story — in my mind, something like Oliver Stone covering the Kennedy assassination by telling the (massively embellished) story of New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison.

The true story apparently has some memorabilia/props affiliated with it that were purchased by a foreign studio, which “studio” considers interest in the project.

He also insisted that two studios had the same story in development recently, and that the story had been written as a magazine article, but there are somehow no rights issues involved. (He also said that, while he can go ahead and write his story because he won’t have to worry about rights, if anybody else attempts the story, he will sue the crap out of them. I laughed.)

His version of the story builds to what he referred to as an “anti-climax.” When posters asked what he meant by this, he said Bambi’s mother getting shot would be an apt comparison; when it was pointed out that Bambi’s mother’s death wasn’t the climax of Bambi, and that typically an “anti-climax” refers to an expectation that isn’t fulfilled, ultimately leading to disappointment, “studio” conceded that disappointment is the desired emotional response.

“studio” firmly believes that this story is so great, so powerful, and will be so well-told that he doesn’t have to worry about complicated things like finding an agent, getting it read at a studio, whatever. He’ll just submit it to a contest, it’ll win, a gigantic studio will buy it and pony up for the huge special effects budget he keeps talking about — everybody wins!

When regulars suggested that he choose a different medium, like writing a novel, he said no. Without elaborating, he said the “true” story would be too short to fill a book, which means he’d have to fictionalize it, which means he’d lose the integrity of the story. It has to be a screenplay. (This is when the magazine article bit came up — when it was suggested he write the true story as an article, he said, “It’s been done.”)

When regulars suggested audiences don’t like to leave the theatre disappointed, and therefore studios don’t like screenplays with disappointing endings, which means even if he does, by some miracle, get his script read, nobody will ever buy it. He didn’t really have an answer to this. Just agreed to disagree. In fact, he insisted repeatedly that he didn’t care if anybody read it or if it ever got made as a movie, but he also kept letting it slip that he really believed he could easily get it sold because any studio would want his story.

Finally, somebody made a disparaging remark about “studio“‘s personal character (a rare switch-up from the usual pattern of embittered newbies attacking regulars) after he admitted to being 48 and unemployed in New Jersey. This started “studio” on a path toward dissent. It’s actually the real irony of this guy — he’s a newbie, but he’s not a troll, and he’s actually in an age bracket where he’d probably get along with a few of the regulars. But after that personal attack, he started taking the less personal attacks (the ones telling him he’s ignorant and unrealistic about his goals) more seriously and, within a few days, disappeared. He started one other thread, asking about the street cred of the regulars, but he seemed unimpressed with the responses.

It’s pretty sad, too, because some of his questions — ignorant as they might have been — weren’t bad. It was only when people started asking for details, because of the weirder questions (like the one about whether or not a studio would be interested in memorabilia, like — I’m only guessing here — a lampshade made of human skin), that they scared him off. And then they barely even acknowledged his real screenwriting questions, which were all about directing on the page. They elected to answer by giving him the usual book recommendations and telling him to download pro scripts…

…which led to the logical question, “Why are all these screenplays filled with camera angles and what looks to me like directing on the page?” I’ve already gone into why I think it’s a bad idea for newbies to read produced scripts as a learning tool, but instead of politely explaining this*, they mostly belittled him.

I admit that this thread entertained me greatly; the weirder “studio“‘s script got, the more he hooked me. Still, I felt bad about the uselessness of the responses and the dismissal of “studio” as a troll when he was merely a confused guy and a dreamer looking for some help and insight.

*In fairness, I think one poster did answer the question, but it was still in the condescending “don’t you get it?!” tone most other posters had adopted by this point.

Edit, 4/14/08 — Going over this message again, it comes across to me like I’m disgusted/irritated/fed up with the clichés and regulars of MSWm. I don’t read it regularly and haven’t contributed to any discussion since probably 2003, but I have a lot of respect for the regulars (except for Skip Press, who’s kind of a douchebag no matter what the thread) as both people and professionals. They all seem like a cool group, and I’d probably hang there more except, like I said, I have no interest in discussing politics on the Internet, and…that’s about 80-90% of that board.

Posted by Stan on April 12, 2008 10:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 28, 2008

Bragging Writes

(I promise I will stop titling posts with awful, awful puns.)

All blogs are devotions to narcissism, and mine is no exception. The Stupid Blogger has opened me up to a galaxy of wannabes and hangers-on clinging to the blogs of moderately successful screenwriters, and I’ve noticed that many of these (including Stupid’s) include a little sidebar hawt CSS action documenting their progress on current projects. I elected to do what any screenwriter would do: I stole it because I thought I could make it better.

I noticed all of these blogs, without exception, ape some code they most likely found here, considering the dimensions and margins are exactly the same (the only difference are the colors). Though it’s helpful and I also stole my code from this blog, I decided to modify it to make it look a little classier (at least, I think it’s a little classier — fuck off if you disagree).

Though I don’t wish to remain fully anonymous (once somebody stumbles across this blog, they can unravel my terrible secrets with ease), I do wish to remain as difficult to Google as possible. As such, I’ll be giving each project outdated working titles instead of the actual, current titles. I know from my own dorky reader experience that if I read a script and wanted to know more about the writer, I’d pop their name and/or e-mail address into Google. If that yielded no results, I’d punch in “[Title] screenplay,” just to see if anything popped up. It only did once, but that’s beside the point: it’s possible. I wouldn’t be thrilled if the Big-Shot Producer or someone from his company Googled “[Dying Proof’s real title] screenplay” and ended up here, where I’ve written moderately hostile things about him.

That long explanation is my way of saying, “That’s why one script shares its title with a Juliana Hatfield song, and the novel is the title of the fictional town in which it takes place.” The war script is so new, I don’t even have an outdated fake title for it. I try to give my material more attention-grabbing titles by the time my work is worth seeing by people who aren’t me and the sad group of Chosen Ones who read my early drafts and send thoughtful comments such as, “Comma splice!” and “Please stop sending me this shit!”

On a slightly less narcissistic note, I felt like I should probably add progress bars like these since I’ll be rambling about these projects more often.

Edit 3/29/08 — Since this is about adding random, unnecessary shit to my blog, I should add that I’ve finally added functional, threaded comments to Stan Has Issues™ — enjoy!

Posted by Stan on March 28, 2008 4:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 23, 2008

Good News, Everyone!

Longtime readers may call my unhealthy obsession with the Beach Boys leading me to a slightly healthier obsession with Dennis Wilson’s long out-of-print LP Pacific Ocean Blue and my complaining that it’s been out of print for almost two decades, despite being much better than a lot of the shit in the Beach Boys’ catalog. Turns out, someone finally agrees with me, and a deluxe, double-CD reissue will come out in June.

I’m both excited about this release and glad I didn’t spend $150 on one of the OOP CDs when I had the chance a year ago.

Posted by Stan on March 23, 2008 6:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 21, 2008

Best Grocery Store Find Ever

Head Wipes: For Discerning Bald Guyz.

Posted by Stan on March 21, 2008 3:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

March 16, 2008

What Is It Good For?

I’m working on something new now. I’m just going to assault people with genre stuff until somebody thinks something I write will make some money. This one’s kind of a kids’ movie — I guess more of a “young adult” thing, though, hitting that “tween” demographic, I guess. I’m trying to keep it toned down in terms of language and violence, but I always liked movies like The Goonies and (the original) Bad News Bears for respecting kids enough to realize that about 90% of them have ridiculous potty-mouths, so everyone in the audience can handle it except overly sensitive parents.

Doesn’t matter. I am consciously trying to keep this free, but here’s where the problem starts: it’s about war. I’m not hugely concerned with the violence — ironically, there isn’t much. It has a lot of satirical elements concerning the futility of war, but mainly it’s about a group of kids whose fighting escalates into all-out assaults during recess. It’s kind of inspired by this general sort of cabin fever that affected kids while I was in junior high; when we were stuck inside for most of fall and winter, when spring broke they’d just go apeshit. We’d have recess in a large park across the street, with more than enough space to hide from the prying eyes of teachers and lunch moms, and all manner of craziness would take place. Nothing to the extreme of this script, but in getting into the mentality of my 12-year-old self, a lot of it felt like the extremes I take the script to. Much of the comedy comes from this exaggeration, but I think it also contains a great deal of emotional (if not literal) truth.

And then I came up with the perfect opening sequence: a beat-for-beat spoof of the Omaha Beach sequence in Saving Private Ryan. Without drawing much attention to the fact that I’m clearly spoofing one of the most famous battle sequences in recent movie history, I’d use the spoof to clearly establish the main characters, the battle lines, the physical space of their “battlefield” (i.e., a city park), and set the comic tone for this goofy “war” (which mainly involves throwing crabapples at the other side, going back to the “it’s not that violent and nobody even gets hurt” statement).

Is this disrespectful? I’m honestly not sure, because my taste has no sense of boundaries. To me, funny is funny, and if I can pull it off the way I think I can, that’s great; if I can’t, I’d end up changing it anyway. Is there a taboo in mocking — even if I’m doing it with affection — a fearless and reverent piece of filmmaking? I don’t know.

Posted by Stan on March 16, 2008 3:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 15, 2008

More Bad News…

Note: This will be my last post on this subject. This blog isn’t about politics, or the atrocious ways the media covers the news, but I dunno…the whole thing makes me feel uncomfortable. Why do people feel the need to be so invasive?

Be sure to read tomorrow’s post: More about masturbation and bowel obstructions!

I still believe the New York Times’ coverage of the Spitzer whore was atrocious, but CNN managed to outdo them pretty quickly:

updated 1:19 p.m. EDT, Fri March 14, 2008
Dupre’s MySpace page evolves with scandal
By Mallory Simon
(CNN) — In three days, Ashley Alexandra Dupre went from being an unknown 22-year-old aspiring musician to the fifth most-searched subject on Google because of her alleged sexual encounters with New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer.
After she was identified by The New York Times, throngs of journalists staked out her home.

At the same time, she appeared to have jumped on her MySpace page, which was identified by the Times, and a Facebook profile with the same name and photos.

It seemed she was trying to stay one step ahead of journalists, attempting to limit what information they could access.

She was seemingly aware that the press would have access to her friends and every word, photo and comment on her profiles, so she began by deleting connections between her friends on Facebook.

Facebook and MySpace have become one of the go-to background tools for journalists in the past couple of years, allowing members of the press to put a face to the subject of their story and find out more about them.

As more people make profiles on these Web sites, the information they make available is more frequently becoming public fodder.

Pictures from her apparent MySpace and Facebook profile were splashed across media Web sites — and Dupre appeared to take notice. Time stamps and activity on what appears to be her Facebook profile shows she was staying up all night cleaning up her profile and responding to critics on the Internet.

American University Professor Chris Simpson, an expert in Internet and privacy law, said there is no expectation of privacy when it comes to social networking Web sites.

If you post photos or comments, there is a chance your information can end up on the front page of The New York Times, although in most cases it won’t.

“A week ago, only [Dupre’s] friends cared,” he said. “But once you put it up for the world to see, you can’t control which fraction of the world will see it.”

Simpson also said while Dupre may have originally left her profiles open hoping someone would discover her music, it also left her susceptible to media scrutiny after the Spitzer scandal.

“Unfortunately, you can’t say, ‘Oh well, I didn’t want that kind of publicity, I only wanted positive publicity,’” he said.

While most people may understand their profiles are subject to public viewing, Amanda Lenhart, senior research specialist for the Pew Internet and American Life Project, said focus groups have shown they generally can’t think of a scenario where their information would become so public.

Early Thursday morning, it appears Dupre realized she needed to make some changes to alter what the public would be able to know about her.

At 3 a.m., there was an entry that she had completed a “thorough profile scrub,” leaving only a couple of photos of herself on Facebook.

At the same time, the self-described aspiring musician left a clip of one of her songs on MySpace and frequently linked to a page where users could download it.

So does Dupre want the attention that comes along with this scandal or not?

“Maybe promoting herself and her music on the Internet means she does want to make it available to everyone in a very public way,” Lenhart said.

Some of her close friends made sure their feelings were known to the press, too. Some posted on her MySpace page telling her to ignore the media, that they would be there for her and reminding her to stay strong.

But even those who weren’t close with her seemed to want in on the action. Some identifying themselves as her high school classmates created a group on Facebook devoted to those who had classes with her.

The early morning hours slipped by and Internet activity on Facebook continued until 5 a.m., when she apparently confronted the high school classmates on the group page. It seemed she believed they were trying to exploit her situation.

“Do me a favor and don’t try to cash out… thanks,” she wrote on the Facebook group page.

Thursday morning, the Dupre Facebook status gave the impression she wanted no part of the attention.

“Sneaking out the back door,” she wrote under her “current status.”

But as the day went on, it seemed Dupre’s feelings were changing and she might have been embracing the newfound spotlight.

The page had received more than 1,100 friend requests on Facebook. Initially, she ignored them.

By the afternoon she apparently gave in, but the feelings were short-lived.

By 2:30 p.m. Thursday the Facebook and MySpace profiles were gone, but they reappeared Friday.

If your attention span is too short to properly digest such thorough journalism, here are the story highlights:

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Dupre becomes the fifth most-searched subject on Google

After being identified by The New York Times, Dupre cleans up her profiles

Dupre to high school classmates: “Do me a favor and don’t try to cash out…”

Facebook and MySpace pages that appeared to be Dupre’s are deleted

So here’s the problem this time: it’s incredibly lazy, bordering on incompetent, to write a lengthy “news story” whose primary source is a MySpace page…

…but it’s still better than writing an article from the perspective of a MySpace-stalker, obsessively checking the profile and recording every minute detail, justifying your actions by talking to “experts” who toss around “maybe” like it’s the only word they know.

I’m not denying that Ashley Alexandra Dupré is newsworthy. Other than her ridiculous hotness (marred only by her comically fake giant boobs), I don’t give half a shit about her. I can understand why people would, and that’s fine. I don’t object to the media covering the story. What they’ve covered so far, however, isn’t a story. Also, Rick Sanchez is a fucking idiot. He has nothing to do with any of this (as far as I know), but he works for CNN and it must be stated. Not even Tony Harris, Paul Zahn, or Soledad O’Brien can match his stupidity. It’s astounding.

Sorry for that diversion. It just has to be mentioned every time CNN is mentioned.

I’ve complained about two “news” sources (so far) stooping to sensationalism (more than usual) because, basically, I’m really angry. Still, at the end of the news cycle, the real idiots have revealed themselves: the American public. As the New York Daily News “reports”, some of Dupré’s songs — featured on a pay music website with a sliding scale — has blasted to the top.

“Move Ya Body” was the quickest cut ever to hit the site’s maximum price of 98 cents per download, said Joshua Boltuch, co-founder of the music Web site, the only place where Dupré’s songs can be purchased online.
“It went up to 98 cents in just five hours during the middle of the night,” Boltuch said. “That’s incredible.”

I can understand going to her MySpace page and listening to the one song she posted there for free out of morbid curiosity. I can’t imagine anybody who wouldn’t after hearing the only interesting fact of her life — her musical aspirations. But to listen to that song, then click her link to the pay site, and lay down money? After hearing one piece of shit song for free, you then pay for two or three more songs? Who does that?*

So far, this has netted Dupré $200,000, or 200 hours of “labor.” That is astounding. Also, nobody in the world — including the billions of people who didn’t pay for her songs; we all deserve to be lumped together for this one — is allowed to accuse her of indecency, immorality, or any of the other disparaging epithets leveled at prostitutes. The most indecent thing about the story to date is how much money gullible idiots gave to her. What the fuck, guys?

*Coldplay fans not required to answer.

Posted by Stan on March 15, 2008 9:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 14, 2008

“Journalism”

It’s the story “everybody” has been waiting for: just who is the woman Eliot Spitzer wanted to sex up? I know I was desperate to know. After all, there’s so little going on in the world. It’s nice to finally see a meaty story. And here’s one, from the New York Times:
For an Aspiring Singer, a Harsher Spotlight
By SERGE F. KOVALESKI and IAN URBINA
Published: March 13, 2008

She left a broken home on the Jersey Shore at 17 and came to New York City to work the nightclubs as a rhythm and blues singer. Now, at 22, she is the unwitting, and as yet unseen, star of the seamy drama that is the downfall of Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York.

Kristen, the prostitute described in a federal affidavit as having had a rendezvous with Mr. Spitzer on Feb. 13 at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, has spent the last few days in her ninth-floor apartment in the Flatiron district of Manhattan. On Monday, she made a brief appearance in federal court, where a lawyer was appointed to represent her. She is expected to be a witness in the case against four people charged with operating a prostitution ring called the Emperor’s Club V.I.P.

In a series of telephone interviews on Tuesday night, she said she had slept very little over the past week, with all the stress of the case.

“I just don’t want to be thought of as a monster,” the woman said as she told the tiniest tidbits of her story.

Born Ashley Youmans but now known as Ashley Alexandra Dupré, she spoke softly and with good humor as she added with significant understatement: “This has been a very difficult time. It is complicated.”

She has not been charged. The lawyer appointed to represent her, Don D. Buchwald, told a magistrate judge in court on Monday that she had been subpoenaed to testify in a grand jury investigation. Asked to swear that she had accurately filled out and signed a financial affidavit, she responded affirmatively.

A person with knowledge of the Emperor’s Club operation confirmed that the woman interviewed by The New York Times was the woman identified as Kristen in the affidavit. Mr. Buchwald confirmed various details of Ms. Dupré’s background but would not discuss the contents of the affidavit.

Ms. Dupré said by telephone Tuesday night that she was worried about how she would pay her rent since the man she was living with “walked out on me” after she discovered he had fathered two children. She said she was considering working at a friend’s restaurant or, once her apartment lease expires, moving back with her family in New Jersey “to relax.”

She did not say when she had started working for the Emperor’s Club, or how often she had liaisons arranged through the ring. Asked when she met Governor Spitzer and how many times they had seen each other, Ms. Dupré said she had no comment.

As of Wednesday morning, Ms. Dupré’s MySpace page recounted her “odyssey to New York from New Jersey through North Carolina, Miami, D.C., Virginia and Austin, Texas;” public records show that she lived in Monmouth County, N.J., in 2001, and in North Carolina in 2003. She owns a company, created in 2005, called Pasche New York, which her lawyer said was an entertainment business designed to further her singing career.

Music is her first love, and on the MySpace page, Ms. Dupré mentions Patsy Cline, Frank Sinatra, Christina Aguilera and Lauryn Hill among a long list of influences, including her brother, Kyle. (She also lists Whitney Houston, Madonna, Mary J. Blige and Amy Winehouse as her top MySpace friends.) In the interview, she said she saw the Rolling Stones perform at Radio City Music Hall on their last tour after a friend gave her two tickets. “They were amazing,” she said.

On MySpace, her page says: “I am all about my music and my music is all about me. It flows from what I’ve been through, what I’ve seen and how I feel.”

She left “a broken family” at age 17, having been abused, according to the MySpace page, and has used drugs and “been broke and homeless.”

“Learned what it was like to have everything and lose it, again and again,” she writes. “Learned what it was like to wake up one day and have the people you care about most gone.

“But I made it,” she continues. “I’m still here and I love who I am. If I never went through the hard times, I would not be able to appreciate the good ones. Cliché, yes, but I know it’s true.”

Ms. Dupré’s mother, Carolyn Capalbo, 46, said that after her daughter finished sophomore year in high school, Ms. Dupré moved to North Carolina. “She was a young kid with typical teenage rebellion issues, but we are extremely close now,” Ms. Capalbo said in a telephone interview Wednesday.

In 2006, Ms. Dupré changed her legal name, according to records in Monmouth County Superior Court, from Ashley R. Youmans to Ashley Rae Maika DiPietro, taking her stepfather’s surname since she regarded him as “the only father I have known.” But in the interview, she referred to herself as Ashley Alexandra Dupré, which is how she is known on MySpace.

On the Web page is a recording of what she describes as her latest track, “What We Want,” a hip-hop-inflected rhythm-and-blues tune that asks, “Can you handle me, boy?” and uses some dated slang, calling someone her “boo.”

“I know what you want, you got what I want,” she sings in the chorus. “I know what you need. Can you handle me?”

Her MySpace biography says she started singing professionally after a musician she was living with heard her singing the Aretha Franklin hit “Respect” in the shower and burst into the bathroom with his lead guitarist. She says she toured and recorded with them, then moved to Manhattan in 2004 and “spent the first two years getting to know the music scene, networking in clubs and connecting with the industry.

“Now it’s all about my music, it’s all about expressing me.”

In the affidavit, the woman the Emperor’s Club called Kristen is described as “an American, petite, very pretty brunette, 5 feet 5 inches, and 105 pounds.” She apparently was booked at about $1,000 an hour, placing her in the middle of the seven-diamond scale by which the prostitutes were paid up to $4,300 an hour.

Ms. Capalbo said that she was “shell-shocked” when her daughter called in the middle of last week and told her she had been working as an escort and was now in trouble with the law. She said she was not sure that Ms. Dupré realized who Mr. Spitzer was when he was her client.

“She is a very bright girl who can handle someone like the governor,” Ms. Capalbo said. “But she also is a 22-year-old, not a 32-year-old or a 42-year-old, and she obviously got involved in something much larger than her.”

Benjamin Weiser contributed reporting.

So here’s the thing: I didn’t give two shits about the news until the epic 2000 election — the first election I voted in — and while I know this isn’t exactly a new thing, the moment I started caring was the moment I (slowly but surely) realized how fucking awful the media covers “news.” Since about 2004, I haven’t been able to look at a newspaper or watch the TV news without feeling mildly disgusted at not just the selection of “stories” but the way in which they are covered. However, the article above goes far beyond any level of badness I’ve witness. Seriously, when the most valuable source you have in your story is a fucking MySpace page, maybe it’s worth holding off the report for a day or two. I don’t even care about the mostly incoherent quotes from her mother, the article’s subtle tone of pity*, or the bland biographical details that barely paint a picture of who she is as a person. I’m bothered by the fact that there’s no story here. Not yet, anyway.

The New York Times is supposed to be all classy and shit, so why did they print this sub-Enquirer bullshit? I mean, their lengthy profile of Axl Rose and his struggle to complete Chinese Democracy was totally pointless and barely newsworthy (especially in 2005 — at the very least, 2007 was a red-letter year for Axl continually saying Chinese Democracy will be out without ever releasing it), but it went into a great deal of depth, didn’t editorialize — author Jeff Leeds just told it, from beginning to end. The worth of a story like that is definitely questionable, but the bottom line is, the story was there to tell. The article on Dupré gives us the fascinating details of somebody’s MySpace profile, with only one or two legitimate quotes from humans worth talking to. Not exactly front-page material. Hell, that’s barely worth burying in the back with follow-ups and Alessandra Stanley retractions.

Is this just a “new kind of journalism” that I’m not understanding? I totally get the value of utilizing “new media” to cover a story. It may have been bad form to publicly release Cho Seung-Hui’s writing and videos, but at least they helped (in some way) to complete our psychological picture of a killer, using his own words. Forget the platoons of pundit/psychologists invading newsrooms nationwide; the fact that we can read his writing, listen to his voice, see his face saying the words — it allows us to draw our own conclusions and understand the situation.

In this case, the MySpace profile is not the story. Generic “insights” on a blog post and faux-profundity don’t paint any kind of portrait of this person. At least, not anything different from any other MySpace profile on the planet. Her terrible song is the closest thing to getting at the truth of this person, her situation, and why she was backed into the corner of whoredom. I hate to sound mean, because I’m not exactly Eric Clapton, but that song screams “don’t quit your day job.”

Still, MySpace is an artifice that exists, in many (dare I say most?) people’s minds, as an avenue to hype themselves up. Every person I’ve ever talked to who had a MySpace profile, even if they decide to make it private at some point, has mentioned putting some kind of lie on their profile, from tiny and white to outlandish and mean.** MySpace is the high school/college reunion of the Internet, a place where many people actively hide their true selves from the people they know will be looking, because it’s a lot easier to just lie than to explain why being the assistant to a big-shot producer is an impressive job even if it only means a tiny credit at the very, very end of Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 sandwiched between CATERING MANAGER and FIRST ASSISTANT ACCOUNTANT.

Should this really pass as news, or as substantive information about a woman somebody, somewhere wants to learn about?

*I don’t think she’s a monster — I mainly think she’s exploiting the wealthy as much as they’re exploiting her, so the whole morality issue is kind of neutralized. Also, living in an apartment in Flatiron and vacationing on the French Riviera? I’m pretty sure if she wanted to “make it” as a singer, her money could be put to better use elsewhere. I do think we should feel sorry for Spitzer’s wife and daughters, though. They can now look forward to an endless series of awkward holidays and family events.

**Like listing your status as “married” because you know it’ll piss off all your old boyfriends.

Posted by Stan on March 14, 2008 4:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

March 7, 2008

Special Effects

I mentioned this offhandedly at one point, but here’s the deal: CGI has ruined special effects innovation. When it is used merely to enhance the story — as in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, for instance, and also Jurassic Park (which I recently rewatched and wow, the special effects still hold up) — and populate a world with things that cannot exist in reality, I don’t have a problem with the use of CGI. Good artists manage to lend weight and texture to the objects, making them look less cartoonish than, say, Samuel L. Jackson’s death in Deep Blue Sea.

However, while there are still minor innovations in the realm of CGI, nothing compares to the insane genius of practical effects. I’ve been working on an action script rewrite, and one of the comments on the previous draft is pretty obvious: too much action. It muddles one character’s arc, which doesn’t quite ruin the script, but it doesn’t help. So lately, I’ve gone back to some of my favorite action movies to see How They Did It — mainly in terms of balancing story and character with action set-pieces.

Watching Point Break a couple of weeks ago helped. The intensity of everything in that movie, from the backyard chase to the end, wouldn’t have much dramatic impact if we weren’t already thoroughly invested in Johnny Utah’s internal conflict. I can’t believe I just wrote that, but it’s true.

I also broke out another Cameron Classic, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which is one hell of a movie with a paper-thin third act (but fuck, they’re up against the T-1000 — who needs plot twists?!). Then I tossed in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Each of these movies gave me separate goals to think about — they’re so tightly constructed. It’s very rare you have a drinking contest as both a point of character development and a major plot point.

After thinking about how to improve my script, I considered the insanity of these movies. Like, at the beginning of the movie, Alfred Molina is covered in tarantulas. Real tarantulas. When was the last time you’ve seen that in a movie? All I ever see are poorly rendered CGI bugs. Most people know the story of Harrison Ford and the cobra separated by a thin pane of glass. Snakes on a Plane (which used more real and/or rubber/”practical” snakes than I would have thought) aped that shot — with a cheesy, CGI snake.

Terminator 2, which did use digital effects extensively (but again, to enhance, not as a cheap catch-all) has some amazing practical effects, like using an amputee for the scene where the T-1000’s body freezes and breaks apart. Can you imagine a time and place where a man was paid millions to come up with a way to have a “liquid metal” machine freeze and break apart, and he comes up with “amputee”? Nowadays, the most innovative thing about a shot like that is actually making the frozen pieces look convincing.

I understand the reasons for the switch: these days, CGI is just cheaper and easier. But as a result, we’ve lost an element of movie magic. There’s rarely a sense of wonder in seeing something new on film. “How’d they do that?” has been replaced by “Wow, that’s pretty good CGI!” It’s disappointing.

Posted by Stan on March 7, 2008 6:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 5, 2008

Harry Caray: Shill

AT&T has launched a devastating attack on Chicago.

Hot off rumors that they bankrolled a dummy consumer-advocacy group to get cable deregulated in Illinois so they could muscle in on untapped territory, they’re launching a new digital cable service across the city. There’s only one problem: nobody’s ever heard of AT&T, a tiny upstart with dim associations with the telephone. They need a great spokesperson to spread the word. Who to get…who to get?

Hey, I know! How about Harry Caray, beloved Chicago icon? Oh…he’s dead?

Hey, I know! Why don’t they get that half-assed comedian, John Campanera, to do a Harry Caray impersonation so bad, it makes Frank Caliendo seem talented. Don’t forget to dress him up so he bears a stronger resemblance to that creepy Six Flags guy than Harry Caray. Also, he needs to do some mildly offensive “Harry Caray is incoherent schtick” hyping up the great AT&T cable plan. That’ll really win over Chicagoans!

Now, look, I think Will Ferrell’s Harry Caray is hilarious, but there’s something about it that’s…I don’t know, endearing, like he loves and embraces the absurdity of Harry Caray’s late-inning, Bud-fueled zaniness and wants to preserve it in his impression. There’s something weird and disturbing about exploiting his memory to sell cable, even more when you add to it the guy is no good and looks really creepy in the make-up. It also might be less offensive if they didn’t play the same three Harry Caray commercials during every single commercial break, on every single channel, everywhere. Damn, AT&T! Scale back the marketing. We already have your phone service; based on our experiences with that, you should already be aware that, if given the choice — which your fake advocacy group deemed so important — nobody in his right mind would switch to you for cable.

Unfortunately, I can’t find any examples of these horrible commercials, but I found something that might actually be worse. John Campanera, without the make-up, doing his impression.

You might notice something odd about this clip. That’s right, it’s taken from a semi-legitimate documentary about the life of Harry Caray. I can’t find much in the way of information at the website explaining who made it and whether or not it’s “official,” but it seems they’ve interviewed some pretty high-profile people who would respect the man’s legacy. Why they spent time talking to a comedian is beyond me, and I’m not sure if misspelling his name shows the filmmakers’ apathy toward him or just general incompetence. The whole thing strikes me as very odd, but at least in the clip (while spectacularly unfunny) he isn’t selling anything. Except, maybe, himself.

On the plus side, I suppose I need to congratulate Chip Caray, for no longer being the most embarrassing part of the Harry Caray legacy.

Posted by Stan on March 5, 2008 8:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 24, 2008

Dull the Hate

I’m not going to lie and say I don’t hate things, because anybody who’s taken even a cursory look at that blog would burst into either laughter or tears (both?) at such an outrageous lie. My recent outburst against the movie Juno might look, on the surface, like a hateful diatribe. I mean, the post has the word “hate” in the title, right?

I did hate Juno. After initially feeling indifferent-yet-positive, closer inspection revealed an aimless story and a protagonist who grew more unlikable the more you learned about her (and she didn’t start out terribly likable in the first place). My real objection, if you cut through the rage, is that it blew a shitload of raw potential on a movie that’s kinda crappy. Making a film is a difficult, expensive process, so why spend the time and money on something that isn’t the absolute best you can make it? Sometimes, it’s just a matter of a weak link; sometimes, it’s a big-ass weak chain.

You might think, based on my review, that the weak link in the film is Diablo Cody and/or her screenplay. Granted, it’s all kinds of bad, but it has so many moments of raw potential that could have been good if, as I suggested, it had undergone a few more rewrites (preferably with a different writer). It had all the elements of a great story, then blew it on an unstructured mess of painful dialogue and cloying sentiment. She missed two great opportunities: (1) pregnancy is hard, especially for teenagers, and (2) there’s so much wonderful irony in the idea of an obnoxious expectant mother inadvertently destroying the marriage of her unborn child’s surrogates.

I’m not saying they had to take it in a pedo direction with Mark and Juno — in fact, I thought what was there was already uncomfortable and unnecessary enough. They just needed to see the storyline through and make it even more destructive and difficult. This would have given Juno her much-needed comeuppance, it would have fleshed out Mark and Vanessa’s ill-defined relationship satisfactorily, and it would have caused all three of these characters to grow and change in interesting ways. As it stands, the divorce is a bump in the road, and both Mark and Vanessa are largely ignored after their dull discussion of it. And yes, I believe they could accomplish all of this while maintaining a sense of humor.

Believe it or not, I didn’t want to turn this into another rant on Juno. I’m just trying to illustrate the untapped potential of that screenplay, which either nobody noticed or nobody cared enough about.

This brings me back to the weak chain. Diablo Cody’s screenplay could have been great if she hadn’t wussed out at every opportunity to make these characters truly come alive with genuine dramatic conflict, which might make you think she’s the weak link. Seems reasonable…

…and yet, people bought this screenplay. People put it through the development wringer (which, contrary to popular opinion, doesn’t always ruin a movie). A great cast and a novice director who made one great movie signed on to it. To hear all of them tell it, this screenplay is the greatest thing in the history of time. I can see certain admirable qualities in the screenplay — including superficial qualities that might appeal to actors, directors, and producers (such as the acting challenge of spewing out that atrocious dialogue, or the “edgy” subject matter) — but at the end of the day, the good doesn’t outweigh the bad. The good doesn’t justify the bad, doesn’t make you ignore the bad, doesn’t redeem a bad movie. There’s just not enough of it, and what is there isn’t good enough.

So I don’t hate everything. I just get disappointed. And then I hate the thing for not living up to standards that, frankly, I don’t think are very high. (Case in point: I watched Point Break this morning. Point fucking Break, a movie I haven’t seen in a few years…and it’s just unbelievably good. Even the ending, which I sorta hated at first because it felt like the studio-imposed “three endings to make sure the broadest group of idiots leaves happy,” started to work for me this time around. So no, I do not have high standards. I just have standards.)

I saw Gone Baby Gone and No Country for Old Men in the same week that I saw Juno. The latter is great, about as good a Coen Brothers movie that’s ever been made (and that’s saying something), but the former was — dare I say it? — a masterpiece. No, “masterpiece” might be too strong, but it’s easily the best movie I’ve seen in a year (not just including movies made within the last year). If anybody wants a lesson in how to do crime thrillers or modern noirs — and based on Hollywood’s output, they need a lesson — Gone Baby Gone is the movie they should start with. Great, economic storytelling, great cast, the best use of cinematic misdirection since Marathon Man.

Why didn’t I write about these movies? Because this blog exists to get the rage out. I like feeling happy; I don’t like feeling rage and distress. One could argue that my lack of posting means I’m happy. I have an ulcer that would suggest otherwise; in fact, maybe that ulcer is saying, “Post more.”

And maybe I will…

…but first! I’ve noticed more than a dozen (which is a lot for this blog) searches for Pan’s Labyrinth and Garden State since I posted the Juno review (which contains a barbed reference to each of those movies). I never reviewed them because, frankly, neither one disappointed or annoyed me. They were awful, but they didn’t spark the rage.

Theoretically, they should have, because of the hype surrounding each. I had been told by many that Garden State is the defining movie of our generation. If it is: wow, what a boring, disaffected generation. At the same time, many of the rugged, manly men I carouse with broke down just before last call and whispered through their tears that Pan’s Labyrinth is the only movie that truly made them weep, and they loved every minute of it. Really?

So here’s a generalized assessment of each:

Garden State — I don’t have much to say except that, in a much less irritating way than Juno (but still kind of annoying), it tried way too hard to find deep meaning in largely meaningless words and actions. On top of which, the pacing was a bit ponderous. Yes, I know this was to underscore the malaise of the characters, but fuck, why would I want to watch a movie about listless people that’s boring as shit? Kevin Smith made Clerks, tackling similar themes about the same age bracket, and managed to make the tedium and malaise snappy and entertaining. (And before you get mad at me for defending Kevin Smith, who is essentially the male Diablo Cody: Clerks is still a good movie. It and the insane animated series spinoff are the only things Kevin Smith is associated with that I still enjoy. I used to be a fanboy; then I stopped being 15. It’s juvenile, but the jokes still work, and its depth and understanding of the sad-sack characters holds up better than the treacly sentiment of his later movies.)

Pan’s Labyrinth — Okay, so Sergi López plays creepy like nobody’s business. So the fuck what? The problem here is the fantasy element. I’m all for magical realism, but this is what Jay Sherman would call “fantacrap.” So you have a little girl. She has a shitty life. She escapes into a fantasy world that’s actually about 1000 times more disturbing than her actual life, but for some reason she has a strong desire to keep escaping to this world, without the movie giving us any firm understanding of why she would (other than the shittiness of her life). At the end, she’s killed and escapes permanently into the fantasy world. I was almost on board with the movie until this point, where all the subtle, disturbing imagery suddenly turned beat-you-over-the-head obvious as the little girl is hailed the queen of this goofy alternate world and can finally be happy in death. Duh! I might have actually been okay with the movie — though not nearly as positive as everyone else on the planet — if Guillermo del Toro hadn’t gone the Jane Campion route of explaining to us how deep his movie is like we’re third-graders. Either be deep or confusing as shit and let us sort it out (like David Lynch), or make a normal movie for the unwashed masses. You can’t have it both ways.

Huh, I guess Pan’s Labyrinth did sort of get the rage going. I should blog more.

Posted by Stan on February 24, 2008 3:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 5, 2007

Now Running MovableType 4.0

Which means maybe I’ll get some control of this spam. Or not.

I had a real, bona fide entry all saved up for the big switch, but for awhile I’m going to be playing around with all the new features and maybe even putting forth the effort to create a unique page style. I’m taking bets on which will come first: a new style or a new, legitimate entry. Any takers? I’ve got $50 on “he’ll just abandon the blog for good!”

Also: it’s gonna look pretty funky until I get the time to make sure all the new templates are working right (so far, they aren’t).

Edit, 9/8/07: Wow, I’ve created both a new layout (not much more than a modified version of my original layout from oh-so-long-ago) and a new post. I’m still tweaking the design, but for right now it’s pretty reasonable in comparison to MT4’s horrific default templates.

Posted by Stan on September 5, 2007 9:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 7, 2007

Open Comments

I’ve vacillated for many years about whether or not to have open comments. Ignoring the many Google hits from “outsiders” looking for “humiliation stories” or “porno stores in des plaines,” among the many other bizarre keyword combinations that will bring you to my mess of a blog, my belief is that anybody who would read the blog and leave a comment is either an R. Kelly fan or a personal friend. This has been the case nine times out of ten, but then came the junk comments.

Yup, once Google archived my entire site, comment-bots came out of the woodwork to wreak havoc on my site for no real reason. Any time I have open comments, I get slammed harder than frequent commenter Teenwolf’s mom on any given Saturday night. This wouldn’t bother me if MovableType had a better spam-catcher. Maybe they will when 4.0 comes out, but for now…it’s pretty shitty, so every time I come home I’m greeted with anywhere between 20 and 70 comments that are pure junk. I have to go through and junk them all, hoping in vain that this will bring MT’s junk filter up to snuff.

Sometimes I disable comments, resulting in panic and uproar from both of my fans. They don’t want to sign up to TypeKey, SixApart’s “authenticated” commenting system, even though it’d make life way easier for me. Do you know how difficult it is to login to MovableType, click “highlight all,” then click “junk”? I’m already guilty enough for never blogging; the junk comments are like a heckling Greek chorus, saying, “Heeey, buddy, we want to hear more stories about masturbation and blow-up dolls.” Well, it’ll happen…someday.

My decision is usually to say, “Suck me,” and disable open comments. If my commenters don’t want to authenticate themselves, I miss out on related ribaldry and possibly invitations to meet up at Adult World. I can live with it.

But then, once in awhile, I get some really nice, well-rounded comments from people I don’t know—new readers who stumbled across it through the aforementioned keywords and did something amazing, astounding, unexpected:

They read my blog. And sorta like it.

I can’t deny that it’s pretty rewarding to have somebody drop some comment science on me. For awhile it was other bloggers, and I’d add them to my embarrassingly brief blogroll. But there’s been quite a lull—

Until now!

And by now, I mean “almost a month ago.”

I was going through the junk comments like, “Jesus, what is wrong with people?” and griping about how MovableType needs a “ban by e-mail” function, because that’d make my life way easier (temporarily, anyway), and then I stumbled across an actual, legitimate comment on an old entry. For those too lazy to click the link, here’s the comment:

Don’t know if you’ll see this because this entry is so old and I’m not sure how blogs work, but here goes:
Something like 10 years ago my best friend’s wife (who works in the industry, she attaches talent to green-lighted projects) told me Mario Van Peebles is gay.

My wife saw some documentary recently that was about Melvin Van Peebles