I'm With Stupid. Won't You Join Us?

So, there's this movie called Fahrenheit 9/11.

A short word of advice: In general, it's highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence. It's also incautious to remind people of Orwell if you are engaged in a sophomoric celluloid rewriting of recent history.

Nasty.

Michael Moore is a filmmaker who produces "mockumentaries," films which purport to be factual, while actually presenting Moore's opinion and supporting it with "facts" which are often wrong, sometimes outright made up, and spun so heavily they're unrecognizeable even when they're accurate.

There's been a small furor over this movie, for no reason that I'm able to fathom. Disney, in a stroke of wisdom so rare amongst their recent decisions, decided not to carry it for U.S. distribution, because it would be contrary to their chosen corporate image. Predictably, Moore tried to use this as evidence that his movie was being "suppressed."
Reality check. No-one was oppressing you. It's just that they think you suck.

Moore's films cater heavily to the hyper-pacifistic left wing, but they require that even the most openly leftist liberal totally disregard common sense and logic, suspend any requirement for evidence, and mindlessly roll along with Moore's babbling rant. Sadly, unlike his previous film Bowling for Columbine, which was at least skillfully enough executed to seem believable, F-9/11 seems instead to have rolled off into the deep end entirely.

In other news, New York Senator Hillary Clinton is not only a communist, but convinced in advance that the Democrats have this election in the bag.

"Many of you are well enough off that ... the tax cuts may have helped you," Sen. Clinton said. "We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."

Wow. Great stuff.

Sweet Jesus, I'm Tired.

Getting up at 5:30 AM, and working until 8:30 PM, sucks.
That said, at least I earned a good chunk of change today.

Believe it or not, you get a lot of good reading done if you're driving a cab. Sometimes you can drop someone off and sit for half an hour before you get another trip, and sometimes if you're waiting at a hotel or club to see if anyone comes out, (in gamer-speak, "spawn-camping" like a mofo,) you can end up with a good chunk of time on your hands. Frankly, there's not a whole lot to do if you're sitting for 45 minutes in a car, in a parking lot somewhere.

So, you read. My tastes run to the Speculative Trifecta: SF, fantasy, and horror. Recently, I re-read Peter Straub's classic novel Shadowland.

Shadowland is one of a very small number of works by Straub that I actually like. As far as I know, I've read everything he's published, but he's very hit-or-miss for me. A short breakdown follows:

*Ghost Story: Just plain cool. At first it tends to wander a bit, but when all the myriad plot threads finally come together at the end of the book you get a dose of severe creep-out.
*Floating Dragon: This novel suffers greatly from schizophrenia. It has all the elements of two pretty good novels, including two complete storylines; sadly, it's meant as one novel, and as such just plain makes no damn sense.
*Koko: Crap. Really. Don't bother.
*The Throat: Sequel to Koko. Remember what they say about sequels.
*Houses Without Doors: Anthologized short fiction, some of which is really amazing. "The Juniper Tree" is very hard reading, for reasons which will become immediately apparent to anyone who picks it up, but it's only one excellent story among several in this collection.
*The Talisman (with Stephen King): This book is cool, but it's obviously the first time King and Straub have worked together. Their writing styles are so wildly different that the book suffers from a sense of disjointedness. It's clearly evident to anyone familiar with both authors' work when one leaves off and the other takes over.
*Black House (Sequel to The Talisman, also with King): This time around it worked much better. Their writing styles, both of them having matured a bit in their craft, flow more smoothly into each other, so that this is a much more coherent narrative; there's never really a point where the narrative voice shifts clearly from one writer to the other, and as a result you can enjoy the story without getting jarred out of your immersion by wild linguistic shifts.

*Shadowland.

This is Straub's best book as far as I'm concerned. I've come back to this book maybe 15 times as I've grown up, and gotten something a little different from it every time. Not many books can do that - Clive Barker's Imajica, Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, Richard Bach's Illusions, J. G. Ballard's Concrete Island. The few, the proud, etc.

Shadowland is the story of a young man who is taken to an estate, called Shadowland, to visit his friend Del's uncle, Coleman Collins, who is a magician. Not a nice one, either; Tom is brought to Shadowland because Collins sees that Tom has the potential to be a magician, and plans to vampirize his power to continue his unnaturally extended life. Tom, in the process of learning magic from Collins, learns how to defeat him.

This book isn't what I would call light reading; but it shouldn't be. This is the kind of book you should enjoy, night after night, in a comfy armchair. Read it. It's really good.

Well, it was worth a dollar fifty.

http://www.punisherthemovie.com/
"The Punisher" is a long, dark slog through grim revenge. Unlike most movies based on comic book heroes, it doesn't contain the glimmer of a smile, and its hero is a depressed alcoholic -- well he might be, since his entire family, including wife, child, father and even distant cousins -- has been massacred before his eyes. As he seeks vengeance, he makes the Charles Bronson character in the movie "Death Wish" look relatively cheerful and well-adjusted.

This from Roger Ebert.

Oddly enough, I find myself in agreement with Ebert most of the time, although he reaches his conclusions after listing reasons that aren't necessarily mine.

Now, this movie wasn't bad. It just wasn't good, either. It suffered, as Hollywood movies nearly always do, from the syndrome that causes screenwriters to change elements of the original source material for no reason whatsoever.

For example:
In the original comic book, "The Punisher," Frank Castle was a cop, and former Marine, whose wife and son were killed by accident in a car bomb meant for him, by the New York Mafia.
In the movie, he's an FBI agent and former "Delta Force" counter-terrorist operative, whose whole family out to the cousins and so forth, about 30 in all, were killed on purpose by hitmen sent by a gentleman named Howard Saint, whose wife asked for their deaths as a gift. This, of course, all takes place in Tampa, Florida, rather than up north.

Never at any point did they attempt to justify these changes; but let's rise above that and move on to the meat of the movie itself.

It suffered greatly from being cheesy. Had they attempted to play it with less comedy, and more as a straight actioner, it would have been both a better movie, and more true to its character's roots. For example, Mr. Saint hires an assassin to come and kill Castle, and the assassin first comes into the diner where Castle is eating and plays him a song on his guitar, and then talks smack to him.

I told my fiancee, "Hey, look, honey, they watched El Mariachi too!" It was incredibly difficult not to laugh out loud at the overacted melodrama present in what was obviously meant as a serious scene, full of menace...

Heh.

There were good moments, the fight between Castle and "the Russian" was so over-the-top it was utterly amusing, and the sheer number of walls that got destroyed was really impressive.

One bit I particularly liked was the scene in which Castle "tortures" one of the lower-echelon hoods that work for Saint by showing him a blowtorch, and then poking him in the back with a popsicle. FYI, that bit can be found in Punisher: War Zone, issue #2. Oddly, let's-change-itism struck again; in the comic, the hood's name was Mickey; in the movie it's Nicky. Tell me, someone, why THAT was actually necessary.

The movie was fun, even in places where the makers clearly didn't intend for it to be, and as such was definitely worth $1.50 a ticket. I'm fairly glad we didn't attempt to see it in a first-run theater for $8.

Oh, Hollywood? Are you listening? If you advertise a soundtrack for a movie with songs by Drowning Pool, you oughta do the band the courtesy of at least having their song appear in the movie. Especially since the one real hit single Drowning Pool has had, "Bodies," is probably the most appropriate music you could have found for this movie. Well, with the possible exception of Dope's "Die, Motherf*****, Die."

Oh boy, here we go.

First off: Xeno, also known as "Zeno" was a Greek philosopher and mathematician from Elea, born sometime between 495 and 480 B.C. He is famous for proposing "paradoxes" to challenge what were then considered mathematical truisms. He wrote nearly forty original paradoxes, of which only eight have survived. His most famous are the Dichotomy, the Achilles, the Arrow, and the Stadium. More information than you could possibly want to know about him can be found here.

Thus the name. Since most things in my life right now are Catch-22's of some sort, or just outright paradoxical, it seemed an appropriate name.

My fiancee has an online journal, in which she rants about all the things that stink for us right now. Although I admit that if I have a bad day, it'll likely spill over, I'm going to try to focus instead on other things.