Author Archives: Tom Crippen

The Thing About Condi

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She’s a jerk. On the smallest, most immediate level, the sort I can appreciate, she’s a fake and a bully. At Harper’s, Scott Horton posts about her torture-heavy Q&A session with students at a Stamford doom. Horton addresses the mismatch between her remarks and publicly known facts. But what gets me is the cheap way she tried to muscle one of the kids asking her questions. It’s not enough that she cherrypicked an isolated finding in a report about Guantanamo (where it called the prison’s physical facilities “a model medium security prison”) and ignored the damning stuff in the same report (treatment of prisoners was “mental torture.” She had to pretend the kid hadn’t done his/her homework.  After trotting out the “model medium” finding: “if you didn’t know that, maybe before you make allegations about Guantanamo you should read.” When she, in effect, blames the Supreme Court for keeping Guantanamo’s inmate indefinitely detained — because the court wouldn’t allow Bush’s people to put the inmates before kangaroo tribunals — she tries to make the student into a stooge by quizzing him:


RICE: Those trials were stayed by whom? Who kept us from holding the trials?

STUDENT: I can’t answer that question.

RICE: Do your homework first.

Oh, thank you, ma’am. She’s playing “look over there,” trying to make the student’s alleged ignorance into the topic of the moment.

The Bush people weren’t just jerks in a grand, world-historical sense. They were jerks at the molecular level too. Cheap bullies and flim-flam artists, whether they were political hustlers or the provost of Stamford.

Transcript of Q&A is here.

Right Once Again

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Specter jumped parties after all; Newt and some fellow ne’er-dowells put the matter in perspective here.


I made an impulsive prediction that Specter would go Democrat here, then foolishly backtracked in the face of news reports, as seen here.

The Hill tells us:

Reid also pledged to campaign for him, one of several concessions he made to woo Specter.


Getting Harry Reid to campaign for you is a good thing? I mean, I like the guy, but I’m one of the few.

From the same article:

He [Specter] would continue to oppose card-check legislation, a high priority of organized labor, unless it was rewritten, he added. 

So we get one used senator who votes the wrong way. Ah well. Still, the turnabout reminds us once again of the O’Reilly principle: nowadays being an anarchist is better for public image than being a Republican. Which is all right by me: anarchists haven’t done all that much harm.


Oliphant Watch: The Pig Busts In

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This one makes sense, which is a letdown, of course. No pointing and giggling.

Obama has got a ton of things to deal with, what with the breakdown of the financial system and the foundering of America’s automakers. The financial firms and car companies are huge institutions, they have their hands out, and they have shone a good deal of selfishness, so thinking of them as pigs comes naturally enough. Now there is a new, large, very different, and unexpected problem called swine flu — another pig, and it’s busting down the door as Obama says, “What now?” So, yeah, all of that tracks.
We get the message only because the two little nattering figures at the edge of the cartoon bother to fill us in. But that’s a technical blemish, not an example of craziness. The point of the cartoon, though not crazy, isn’t all that interesting — another problem for the president? damn! — but what the hell. That’s still a really good giant pig Oliphant draws for us.
Sorry, Matthew, if you’re reading this. Maybe next time.
(For crazier Oliphant times, click here.)   

Oh Christ. Just Fuck God in the Ass and Leave Him Bleeding

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… a conscious effort to inscribe this “Trek” in the storytelling traditions popularized by Joseph Campbell, in which heroes must suffer loss and abandonment before they rise to the occasion. The filmmakers admit that this is a deliberate homage to their favorite films, like “Superman,” “Star Wars” and “The Godfather Part II.”


From the New York Times via The New Republic’s Plank blog. The article in question discusses what J.J. Abrams has in mind for his reboot of the Star Trek franchise.

The quote is stupid because, as the Plank item points out, Godfather II ends with Michael Corleone’s soul and family in ruins: he is corrupted and he is alone. The Godfather films aren’t about someone being tested and rising to the occasion; they’re about someone getting pulled in, just like it says in that goofy line from Godfather III  (you know, “they keep pulling me back in!”). Michael Corleone isn’t young Luke Skywalker or Clark. He isn’t callow and in need of challenge. From the start, he is a born leader, a paragon of competence and nerve, a decorated war hero and cool-headed tactician. He is the dream self-image of Mario Puzo, that poor shambling yutz who wanted to pretend he was hard, compact and capable. Corleone starts as a hero and always has the gifts of a hero, but he loses his way morally. This process begins, for all reasons, because he loves his father, who happens to be a Mafia chieftain. And that tragedy is the whole point of the Corleone story.

Doesn’t this matter? Can’t J.J. Abrams and the New York Times demonstrate some understanding of one of the most famous movies of our time? The story has nothing to do with Joseph Campbell. Nothing! If you want to feel important while talking about the Godfather films, just say “Shakespearean.” Go ahead, it feels good. You won’t be adding anything, but neither will you be demonstrating your ignorance.

UPDATE:  Another point.  Godfather II begins with Michael Corleone already in his father’s place, a man with wife, kids, and responsibilities. It’s in the first Godfather film that he’s a young man whose life is taking form. Mr. Abrams and the New York Times couldn’t even pick the right film to get confused about.

Two Things I Thought I Knew

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I’ve been reading about Watchmen, the book and the movie. In the comic, I always thought the Gordian Knot Company was a bit of a stretch as names go. Yes, the Gordian knot was impossible to untie, but you don’t really think of untying locks,  just opening them; to my mind, rope and metal are too different for one to easily suggest the other. Additionally, the legend of the Gordian knot is known but not widely known, at least not in the U.S. Not a likely name for a small-time consumer service company.

I figured Moore wedged the name in there simply to further his Veidt-Alexander parallels. But no. He said in 1988 that he just thought the name would be funny and that it was only as the book went on that he realized how it dovetailed with Veidt’s monumental self-esteem.
Next, the movie gives us Dr. Manhattan always surrounded by an eye-repelling blue-white glow. I thought the glow was one further effect of the film’s deadly CGI blight. Again no.  Peter Aperlo’s Watchmen: The Movie Companion tells us the glow comes from the little bulbs on Billy Crudup’s motion-capture suit. It was, what do you call, actual-source light or something. Only the big blue muscles were CGI.

Mysteries of Young Women

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I live in the section of Montreal near McGill University. There are lots of college kids around. Right now it’s finals and the 2nd Cup is jammed full of kids studying. I’m parked at my little table in a row of other little tables, all of them full except for the one to my left. It has a textbook placed on its far edge and a slim sheaf of papers placed atop the textbook. During the past hour four different people have tried to park themselves at the table. Each time the girl sitting one table over has told them no, “somebody’s sitting there.” But there isn’t. Her friend, who had been there, took off to print something at home and so far has not returned. As mentioned, the coffee shop is jammed and, like the missing girl, the people who want to sit down are students frantic to get ready for big tests.

It amazes me how young women feel entitled to pull stunts like this. I’ve seen them try it at the gym too: “I’ll just wrap my sweater around the handles of this elliptical machine and come back in 20 minutes, and meanwhile Monica will tell all comers ‘somebody’s using the machine.'” My theory is that men don’t go in for such wanton abuses of “saving” because they’re afraid someone will hit them. 
UPDATE:  A fifth character just got turned away. Agitated, I leaned over to the friend and said, “I’ve got to say, this is getting to be a bit unfair.”
The friend: “I know, I know. I agree. I’ll call her.” She gets out her cell phone. So maybe western civilization is safe after all.
UPDATE:  The girl is back. To her friend: “Sorrryyy. Oh, sorrryyyy.” She has one of those lockjaw drawls.

Nobody Much Is Watching the Watchmen

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Thanks to patford at TCJ’s message board, we have a link to this box office status report by Simon Brew at the site loudly named Den of Geek! The news is mediocre:

Seven weeks after its release, however, and Watchmen‘s legs have all but buckled. For the weekend just gone, its seventh on release, the film brought home $199,114. More worryingly, that makes for a total take of $106,848,750 in America. It’s the 358th most successful film of all time in the US off the back of those numbers, and in 357th is Batman & Robin.

Oy!

The current international take for the film, and this has been petering out too[,] … currently sits at $74,207,581, for a total worldwide gross of $181,103,123. For the sake of comparison, Batman & Robin drew over $130m overseas, for a total of $238m.

Out of Watchmen‘s receipts has to come the exhibitors’ revenues, marketing costs, distribution expenses and such like. And then there’s the film’s budget, with the most conservative suggesting that it cost $120m to bring the film to the screen in the first place. Off the back of box office returns such as Watchmen‘s, it’s perhaps unsurprising that we’re not going to be seeing a mass market R-rated comic book movie for a long time to come.

…
Fortunately, for Watchmen its real money spinner is yet to come. … it’s a film that’s going to have legs for many years on the home market, and Warner Bros will no doubt keenly exploit it with special and collectors’ editions en masse over the coming decade or so. Watchmen will not, when the final numbers are totted up, be a business failure for the studio.
…
However, tomorrow – Friday April 24th – marks the film’s 50th day on release, and it’s just a shame that it won’t be playing for that much longer …
Well, no, there I cannot agree. Watchmen is not a good movie, especially when viewed in a  theater with a big sound system. There is much pain and tedium built into the Watchmen-viewing experience. Yet I do believe the predictions of a long home-theater afterlife are correct. I know I want a copy, as long as I don’t have to pay retail. The Watchmen movie is bizarre and unique, and I still love the credits sequence.
Oh yeah, this link will start you on a magical mystery tour thru the posts Noah and I did about the film’s many shortcomings and isolated virtues.