Three-sentence Inglourious Basterds review August 21, 2009
Posted by Evil Bender in Film, arts and culture.add a comment
Quentin Tarantino loves movies. Watching his movies reminds rekindles my love of movies. Inglourious Basterds is no exception, and has bonus killing of Nazis.
[Bonus 4th sentence: Highly Recommended, and not for the faint of heart.]
Beards are proof of evolution is false? August 10, 2009
Posted by Evil Bender in Origins, Science, wingnuts.1 comment so far
So says “Brian Thomas, M. S.“:
On the other hand, if everything was created by a God who exists outside the physical world, there is a ready answer, one with broad application: beards present a certain appearance. Aesthetic features were emplaced by Someone who knew how things look in addition to how things work. Beards do not confer any selectable survival advantage to humankind, but they do serve to add distinction to men, perhaps as different features distinguish women.
It would be consistent to think that it simply pleased the Creator to outfit humans and other creatures with certain visually appealing characteristics. “But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him” (1 Corinthians 15:38). The study of purposes is called apobetics, and beards are evidence that God designed certain features simply with aesthetics in mind.
I’ll just point out that this is actually a pretty decent argument when compared to the ICR’s usual tripe. Which means, naturally, that it’s only embarrassing, not shockingly embarrassing.
Right up until the end of the piece, that is:
Researchers have not yet found a metaprogram in this universe that guides clouds of space dust into raw functional, let alone variously aesthetic, forms. After all, what does the impersonal universe care about beauty? A Creator God who appreciates beauty and wants others to appreciate His handiwork must be responsible for the origin of aesthetic features. Men have beards–some thick, some sparse–because it pleased God to adorn them so.
Don’t you love it when Creationists think they’ve just indicted science for points that scientists long-since have considered and dealt with? It’s almost as funny as their pathetic misunderstandings of evolutionary theory. Seriously, have these people ever heard of sexual selection? Genetic drift? For that matter, are they really so stupid that they can’t think of a more plausible reason that beards aren’t in favor than that A Magic Man Gave Them To Us But We’ve Lost Our Way? (Hint to Creationists: when is a beard more important? when you’re in a cave or your parents’ nice warm basement?)
Ross Douthat’s shocking misdirection on Affirmative Action July 21, 2009
Posted by Evil Bender in bigotry, race, wingnuts.2 comments
I can’t decide if Douthat is dishonest or just stupid in this column. But one thing is certain: whether intentionally or unintentionally, he is misconstruing the purpose of Affirmative Action in order to attempt to destroy it:
As this generation rises, race-based discrimination needs to go. The explicit scale-tipping in college admissions should give way to class-based affirmative action; the de facto racial preferences required of employers by anti-discrimination law should disappear.
A system designed to ensure the advancement of minorities will tend toward corruption if it persists for generations, even after the minorities have become a majority.
Douthat arrives at his conclusion by implying–but never stating directly–that Affirmative Action isn’t needed in a place where there are more People of Color than whites. But of course Affirmative Action has never been meant to correct numerical discrepancies in population–rather it is meant to account for and help correct the pervasive systematic discrimination that sees the highest rungs in society dominated by those who have most benefited from the systematic oppression of minorities: white men, and in particular, rich white men.
There is probably some merit in more focus on class in college admissions, as Douthat notes, but he seems to suggest that merely to gloss over a reality he would as soon not admit: that even with Obama as President and a second woman and Latina about to sit on the Supreme Court, the most powerful positions in society are still overwhelming held by white men, who benefit from their own sorts of Affirmative Action, including Legacy Admissions, family wealth and connections.
Douthat is either a fool or a liar to think the problems faced in overcoming discrimination by People of Color* will be erased as their percentage of the population increases.
And if he doubts that, maybe he can spend some time poking at post-civil war southern society, and see how much good having a majority did Black southerners then. The idea that majority status and a few high-placed People of Color can wipe out very real oppression is ridiculous on its face, which is likely why Douthat conceals it.
*And seriously, what the fuck? “if current demographic trends continue, nonwhites — black, Hispanic and Asian — will constitute a majority of Americans under 18. By 2042, they’ll constitute a national majority,” Douthat writes. As though somehow the moment white people are outnumbered they are suddenly doomed? And as though all People of Color can be conveniently lumped together when it suits him, facts be damned?
When we say that wingnut economics is discredited, this is why July 13, 2009
Posted by Evil Bender in News and politics, economics, wingnuts.5 comments
Over at Atrios’ pad, echidne notes that Republicans don’t seem to mind screwing over ordinary people, but slight tax increases on the rich are right out. We all knew that. We also knew this:
Senator John Kyl, the Republican Whip, also flatly rejected any such tax increase.
“We’re in a recession,” he told CNN. “It would be a job killer. It would be exactly the wrong thing to do any time, but especially when we’re in the middle of a recession.
Recession? Cut taxes! Boom? Cut taxes! Inflation? Cut taxes! Deflation? Cut taxes!
Seriously, if it’s “exactly” the wrong thing to do at any time, how can that be more true during a recession? These assholes aren’t even trying any more.
The Invisible Library: so cool July 8, 2009
Posted by Evil Bender in language and lit.add a comment
Via Crooked Timber, I give you the Invisible Library, devoted to listing books which only exist only in the pages of other books.
Such a library already existed, of course, but only in dreams. Having it exist online and (briefly) in the physical world is cool beyond belief. Perhaps the Tenderpixel Library is one of the remaining soft places?
Are summer blockbusters too long? July 4, 2009
Posted by Evil Bender in Film, arts and culture.2 comments
Matthew Yglesias asks an interesting question:
I went to see Public Enemies last night…the movie just seems way too long.
This is, it seems to me, a surprisingly common problem with would-be summer blockbusters. And it’s a problem I have a lot of trouble understanding. After all, movie studios would seem to have a strong incentive to make movies shorter. With a shorter movie, you should be able to pack more showings into a given day and sell more tickets and popcorn and such. And yet I feel like it’s way more common to walk out of a theater feeling that a movie was too long than to walk out feeling like I wished there’d been 15 more minutes. I don’t think I’m alone in this feeling. So what’s going on?
I don’t think the problem is actually the length of movies is the problem, but rather the choices of what to include. I didn’t walk out of the 150-minute Dark Knight wishing it had been over sooner, but Year One, felt agonizingly long at 100 minutes.* Public Enemies did drag, despite excellent performances, because too much of the film seems unnecessary: there are several scenes in the film that just aren’t that compelling.
It’s easy to name an excellent long film and contrast it to a terrible short film to make this point, but I think there’s something larger at work: part of what makes a movie excellent is that you don’t feel like there is lots of unnecessary filler. If you’re consistently entertained, then the film will seem well timed at 90 minutes or 160. If you’re bored (which happens either because the film is terrible or because at least some sections of it aren’t compelling) then the film will feel too long.
So my interpretation is that a film only becomes “too long” when it no longer holds its audience’s attention. Comedies which fall in the third act, “thrillers” which drag in the middle, and action films whose plot dawdles are all examples of “too long” films, while length matters almost not at all to a film that’s working. Watching the flop Grindhouse in the theater I had one of the best movie-going experiences of my life despite (or perhaps because of) its double-feature length, and the few others in the 11:45 PM showing seemed to agree. Most others didn’t, and the film bombed.
Personal experience isn’t the only datum to suggest this interpretation. A glance at the top-grossing films of all time suggests that audiences will happily sit through long movies when they’re entertained, and that making a film that clocks in at the now-standard 115 minutes isn’t necessarily a better choice.
The last two films I’ve seen, Public Enemies and the odious Transformers 2: Racism and Robot Balls, both stretch a little story into a long film. In Public Enemies, we tolerate some of that due to some quality film making, but eventually the movie drags. In Transformers, the entire first act is a complete waste, and so even the (pretty cool) robot fights in the last half-hour seem like agony, because I was too bored and offended by that point to really appreciate them. If Bay was a smarter film-maker, he would have brought us to the action much more quickly. If the film was 90 minutes, it would have at least been tolerable.
If Hollywood wants to avoid lengthy films that unnecessarily drain the box-office, they should encourage their directors to be better editors of their own films.
As a side note, this theory also explains, I think, why the best films’ deleted scenes aren’t generally compelling. Watch the deleted scenes in Reservoir Dogs, if you haven’t done so, and it’s clear why they were cut. The film feels perfect at its length, and the deleted scenes don’t add anything important. Some deleted scenes are interesting on their own merits, and some directors over-cut their films, leaving key information out of the narrative and making the film incoherent. But the more deleted scenes seem to add to a film, or the more that scenes in the film should have been deleted, the more likely it is the film is going to feel the wrong length, and that it won’t work.
*I saw Year One for free, and still felt I’d overpaid.
Pat Buchanan takes on evolution with his usual level of scholarship July 1, 2009
Posted by Evil Bender in Origins, Religion, Science, wingnuts.2 comments
…which is to say, revisionist nonsense.
Pat Buchanan, last seen suggesting that WWII was the fault of Churchill, and already infamous as a holocaust denier, has decided to turn his Goldberg-esque eye on Evolution. As an exercise in demonstrating just how odious Buchanan is, and as yet another reminder that MSNBC continues to give the bigot a voice, this post will point out just a few of Buchanan’s lies and distortions. Readers are encouraged to fill any gaps with their own observations: there is literally too much here for me to track down every error.
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. (I am wingnut–I contain multitudes.) June 27, 2009
Posted by Evil Bender in reproductive rights, sex, wingnuts.1 comment so far
So let’s see what Sally Kern’s up to. It seems she’s blathering on about how the only cure for our horrible country is to pray and read the Bible. In the midst of this, we get:
…WHEREAS, this nation has become a world leader in promoting abortion, pornography, same sex marriage, sex trafficking, divorce, illegitimate births, child abuse, and many other forms of debauchery…
So, to recap, being a good wingnut means being against both abortion and single parenthood. And while we’re at it, Kern babbles, let’s make those dirty urges harder to deal with on one’s own.
It seems Sally forgot to include the evils of enjoyable sex in her list. But, hell, it’s asking a lot for wingnuts to keep track of what they hate and the reasons they claim they hate those things. You can almost hear her brain grinding as she tries to remember what is the official reason she hates sex.
And, yes, my apologies to Walk Whitman.
So would Milbank suggest this is essentially the same as Bush’s Jeff Gannon moment? June 24, 2009
Posted by Evil Bender in News and politics.add a comment
Obama asking a reporter who was covering Iran for a question from an Iranian is, according to Milbank, “theater.” He further blathered
During the eight years of the Bush administration, liberal outlets such as the Huffington Post often accused the White House of planting questioners in news conferences to ask preplanned questions. But here was Obama fielding a preplanned question asked by a planted questioner — from the Huffington Post.
While Milbank is wrong on the substance, one also wonders if he can honestly believe that alerting a reporter that he might be called on is in any way equivalent to the administration that brought us “Jeff Gannon.”
That’s serious journalism for ya, folks.
Mike S. Adams doesn’t get the difference between teachers and students June 24, 2009
Posted by Evil Bender in Religion, bigotry, wingnuts.1 comment so far
[Update: Awesome. Adams' website currently has the same essay as Townhall, but all references to feminists have been changed to his personal derogatory term for LGBT students. h/t. He's a real deep thinker, that Adams.]
Mike S. Adams, who you may remember, is currently running around screaming about being oppressed. Exactly how a fundie professor who gets to make stupid assertions in public is being oppressed is, as always, unclear. But two things are clear:
1) Adams is yet another wingnut who falsely believes he knows how to use satire;
2) Adams doesn’t understand that a professor has different classroom obligations from his/her students.
Adams begins with a long whine about how feminists didn’t appreciate his satire about silencing feminists students in his classroom, then moves on:
