Why Dave loves NASCAR so much
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Friday, August 24, 2007
F.U. News Friday Game
Hapland, an intriguing point-and-click puzzle game with stick men. The first in a series of three games, each more difficult than the previous. Walkthroughs are for losers!
Warning: time-consuming.
Hapland, an intriguing point-and-click puzzle game with stick men. The first in a series of three games, each more difficult than the previous. Walkthroughs are for losers!
Warning: time-consuming.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Becoming Jane
One man’s secret mission to infiltrate the secret world or women
Aka A rant against the movie, the woman and anyone who ever liked the woman
Becoming Jane was as insipid, uninspiring, unimaginative, uneventful and whatever adjective means opposite of “epoch in nature” as any episode of Sex in the City could hope to be. All in all, it was everything that Jane Austin would have wanted.
I would start here by posting a “Spoiler” warning, but I don’t think I could further spoil this movie beyond what state the screen writers left it in.
So the movie starts with long shots of English country side and horses eating in the pastures. My mind already begins wondering how the rumble of German bombers could improve this scene. And then the movie goes downhill. Suddenly we break into mindless blabbering of Jane as she searches for adjectives to describe something unimportant. Then we cut to Farmer Hoggett and his sexual romp with his wife (strangely I can’t stop humming “Magic Carpet Ride”….). Great start, Julian Jarrold, I’m sure Mother Teresa would be happy. Then some more blah blah blah occurs, and finally we suffer one last slew of useless cross-fade sequences to see an aged, unmarried Jane talking to the now married dim-bulb she spent the movie fretting over and meeting his daughter, Jane. At this point, the girls in the audience whimper. “Twue love”, I think I hear someone say over a sob. I re-swallow my lunch.
Among some of the “memorable” lines my brain wandered in and out of was one Jane spoke to Darcy-I-mean-Lefroy (the Jane Austin equivalent of Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine’s Nazi-I-mean-Soviets) included some equivalent to “That would be living a lie, could you do that?”. That may be a tough question for a girl to answer, but we men have all seen Natalie Portman in a leather corset asking that question and know that the only appropriate answer to that is a chorus of YESes sung to the explosive end of the 1812 overture (something like “yes-yes-yes-yes-yes-yes-yes YES, YES, YES” looped something like 4 times before you hit the low YESes).
At this point, you are saying, “But what do you know Tom, your just a boy!” (yes, you misspell you’re as you speak it too). Here is what Mark Twain has been quoted as having said about Jane Austin:
Jane Austen? Why I go so far as to say that any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen. Even if it contains no other book.
To me his prose is unreadable–like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.
Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.
I haven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
So now you think “Well, what does he know. He’s just a guy that does… stuff!” Well fine, then let me get one of her greatest compliments by Lionel Trilling and beat the hell out of it to illustrate my point:
"It was Jane Austen who first represented the specifically modern personality and the culture in which it had its being. Never before had the moral life been shown as she shows it to be, never before had it been conceived to be so complex and difficult and exhausting. Hegel speaks of the "secularization of spirituality" as a prime characteristic of the modern epoch, and Jane Austen is the first to tell us what this involves. She is the first novelist to represent society, the general culture, as playing a part in the moral life, generating the concepts of "sincerity" and "vulgarity" which no earlier time would have understood the meaning of, and which for us are so subtle that they defy definition, and so powerful that none can escape their sovereignty. She is the first to be aware of the Terror which rules our moral situation, the ubiquitous anonymous judgment to which we respond, the necessity we feel to demonstrate the purity of our secular spirituality, whose dark and dubious places are more numerous and obscure than those of religious spirituality, to put our lives and styles to the question …"
“moral life [is] complex and difficult and exhausting” I detest that loathsome “but life is so hard” attitude. Practical, physical life is hard. Hoeing a field is hard! Deciding if you want to go to church today is not. Deciding if genocide is good or bad is not. Moral life is almost always a simple black or white when you break it down to its simplest components. If you make it complicated that is because you don’t like some of what you know to be true. “Should I marry a guy who’s boring but my family wants me to marry him and I’ll be poor if I don’t but I’ll be rich if I do and people will like me but I’ll be miserable and what will the children be like and how shall I get on in age as I am married to someone who may change or may not….” Blah blah blah. Break it down: Can I love him? Specifically, can I change ME to make ME love him, and can I be faithful? Yes, no? I don’t care, flip a damn coin. This is not tough.
Farmer Hoggett had a great line in the movie saying that poverty breeds misery (or something to that effect). He is correct, and a lady should smartly choose a good provider as she seeks a spouse. But again I point out, it is a simple question to answer: can I change me to make me love him, and can I be faithful? (of course I’m assuming the “can he change himself to love me and can he be faithful” question is a yes as Jane Austin’s male characters are generally made out of cardboard and don’t have any depth so I assume the blandest yes).
Now of course 90% of chicks reading this out there will say “But what if there is someone better out there?” and alternatively some will say “What if they aren’t my soul mate?” News flash, genius: There will always be “someone better” out there and a soul mate is not some single random person wandering the earth that you have to find like Where’s Waldo. Your spouse IS your soul mate BECAUSE you choose to make yourself theirs. So whoever you choose to change yourself and sacrifice yourself for IS your soul mate, at least until they die and you grab another. So, in conclusion on this part, if you think you could stand to wait a while longer for someone better (someone you don’t have to change as much for) to come along, then wait.
“the modern epoch” That is her real problem: She raises petty personal problems to the level of an Epoch. She spends more time with a character fretting about what to say to a suitor than Homer with Odysseus’ battle with the Cyclops. She has no sense of proportion and raises every little concern to the level of catastrophe. Jane frets about having to grow up in a man’s world as a female author threatened with the prospect of hoeing a garden for potatoes. Odysseus was looking forward to getting home and working on his lands but he had giant sea creatures in the way.
Perhaps I can’t blame Jane Austin too much for according to this movie anyway, she was raised in a society built entirely on inheritance. Her mother wants her to marry some guy for inheritance. Her “sister” (I think distant French relative even though they kept referring to her as sister) escaped the French Revolution but brought her dead husband’s money with her and marries Jane’s brother. Neither work after the marriage. Jane’s true love lives on the money doled to him by his uncle and even his brothers and sisters in America live off that money as he sends it to them. It is mentioned multiple times in the movie that those who don’t marry for money end up poor and various examples of relatives are given. Out of curiosity, who the hell in this country actually worked for money? Something doesn’t seem right.
“She is the first to be aware of the Terror which rules our moral situation” I agree that is how she portrays our moral situation, but that is just dumb. No further comments needed.
“the purity of our secular spirituality, whose dark and dubious places are more numerous and obscure than those of religious spirituality” Sounds like somebody is an atheist. I agree that religious spirituality does not have many dark and dubious places and is not that obscure, but… WHAT?! Only a sissy could dwell on this crap!!! Who cares? Good vs Evil, that is a story! Not ambiguous vs. ambiguous, that is boring and leans towards evil since it degrades the moral importance that Good vs Evil epochs teach.
Jane Austin may be the grandmother of the Soap Opera, shows that dwell to a near vicious level on relationships and their importance. Am I saying that relationships have no place in story? No! But manly movies never make a character more important than his environment. Take Shawshank Redemption, a story all about a man falsely accused. The movie doesn’t dwell as much on the tortured soul of the falsely accused and how his wife cheated on him. Instead it shows how he got over it and righted a great injustice going on in the prison. The Jane Austin version would have dwelled on what a great friend in prison he made. All action movies involve the hero making the world a better place, and don’t focus on how he made himself a slightly better person. That is always the smaller side story. Hamlet, one of the manliest stories of all time (some would misunderstand as a chick flick simply because it dives into character), spends his life trying to find out how he can avenge his father’s death. There is something greater than himself. In Becoming Jane, there is nothing greater than Jane’s happiness. She is not a heroine; she is a leaf on the wind complaining about how the wind isn’t fair to her.
Oh and one last thing, the commercials prior to this movie were a dead giveaway for the dim-bulb nature of the audience. All of them were hippy movies that no doubt will barely make their budgets back. Among the most memorable was the story of some mexican kid who adventures to America to see his mother working in LA, and the plot revolves around illegal immigration and how no law can break the bond of mother and son. Make me puke.
Big whoop. Go see Hot Rod, you’ll pee yourself laughing. That movie has good lines in it like “I’d rather die than live in a world where I can’t kick your ass”.
PS.
Question: Why would I go watch this movie?
Answer:
One man’s secret mission to infiltrate the secret world or women
Aka A rant against the movie, the woman and anyone who ever liked the woman
Becoming Jane was as insipid, uninspiring, unimaginative, uneventful and whatever adjective means opposite of “epoch in nature” as any episode of Sex in the City could hope to be. All in all, it was everything that Jane Austin would have wanted.I would start here by posting a “Spoiler” warning, but I don’t think I could further spoil this movie beyond what state the screen writers left it in.
So the movie starts with long shots of English country side and horses eating in the pastures. My mind already begins wondering how the rumble of German bombers could improve this scene. And then the movie goes downhill. Suddenly we break into mindless blabbering of Jane as she searches for adjectives to describe something unimportant. Then we cut to Farmer Hoggett and his sexual romp with his wife (strangely I can’t stop humming “Magic Carpet Ride”….). Great start, Julian Jarrold, I’m sure Mother Teresa would be happy. Then some more blah blah blah occurs, and finally we suffer one last slew of useless cross-fade sequences to see an aged, unmarried Jane talking to the now married dim-bulb she spent the movie fretting over and meeting his daughter, Jane. At this point, the girls in the audience whimper. “Twue love”, I think I hear someone say over a sob. I re-swallow my lunch.
Among some of the “memorable” lines my brain wandered in and out of was one Jane spoke to Darcy-I-mean-Lefroy (the Jane Austin equivalent of Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine’s Nazi-I-mean-Soviets) included some equivalent to “That would be living a lie, could you do that?”. That may be a tough question for a girl to answer, but we men have all seen Natalie Portman in a leather corset asking that question and know that the only appropriate answer to that is a chorus of YESes sung to the explosive end of the 1812 overture (something like “yes-yes-yes-yes-yes-yes-yes YES, YES, YES” looped something like 4 times before you hit the low YESes).
At this point, you are saying, “But what do you know Tom, your just a boy!” (yes, you misspell you’re as you speak it too). Here is what Mark Twain has been quoted as having said about Jane Austin:
Jane Austen? Why I go so far as to say that any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen. Even if it contains no other book.
To me his prose is unreadable–like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.
Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.
I haven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
So now you think “Well, what does he know. He’s just a guy that does… stuff!” Well fine, then let me get one of her greatest compliments by Lionel Trilling and beat the hell out of it to illustrate my point:
"It was Jane Austen who first represented the specifically modern personality and the culture in which it had its being. Never before had the moral life been shown as she shows it to be, never before had it been conceived to be so complex and difficult and exhausting. Hegel speaks of the "secularization of spirituality" as a prime characteristic of the modern epoch, and Jane Austen is the first to tell us what this involves. She is the first novelist to represent society, the general culture, as playing a part in the moral life, generating the concepts of "sincerity" and "vulgarity" which no earlier time would have understood the meaning of, and which for us are so subtle that they defy definition, and so powerful that none can escape their sovereignty. She is the first to be aware of the Terror which rules our moral situation, the ubiquitous anonymous judgment to which we respond, the necessity we feel to demonstrate the purity of our secular spirituality, whose dark and dubious places are more numerous and obscure than those of religious spirituality, to put our lives and styles to the question …"
“moral life [is] complex and difficult and exhausting” I detest that loathsome “but life is so hard” attitude. Practical, physical life is hard. Hoeing a field is hard! Deciding if you want to go to church today is not. Deciding if genocide is good or bad is not. Moral life is almost always a simple black or white when you break it down to its simplest components. If you make it complicated that is because you don’t like some of what you know to be true. “Should I marry a guy who’s boring but my family wants me to marry him and I’ll be poor if I don’t but I’ll be rich if I do and people will like me but I’ll be miserable and what will the children be like and how shall I get on in age as I am married to someone who may change or may not….” Blah blah blah. Break it down: Can I love him? Specifically, can I change ME to make ME love him, and can I be faithful? Yes, no? I don’t care, flip a damn coin. This is not tough.
Farmer Hoggett had a great line in the movie saying that poverty breeds misery (or something to that effect). He is correct, and a lady should smartly choose a good provider as she seeks a spouse. But again I point out, it is a simple question to answer: can I change me to make me love him, and can I be faithful? (of course I’m assuming the “can he change himself to love me and can he be faithful” question is a yes as Jane Austin’s male characters are generally made out of cardboard and don’t have any depth so I assume the blandest yes).
Now of course 90% of chicks reading this out there will say “But what if there is someone better out there?” and alternatively some will say “What if they aren’t my soul mate?” News flash, genius: There will always be “someone better” out there and a soul mate is not some single random person wandering the earth that you have to find like Where’s Waldo. Your spouse IS your soul mate BECAUSE you choose to make yourself theirs. So whoever you choose to change yourself and sacrifice yourself for IS your soul mate, at least until they die and you grab another. So, in conclusion on this part, if you think you could stand to wait a while longer for someone better (someone you don’t have to change as much for) to come along, then wait.
“the modern epoch” That is her real problem: She raises petty personal problems to the level of an Epoch. She spends more time with a character fretting about what to say to a suitor than Homer with Odysseus’ battle with the Cyclops. She has no sense of proportion and raises every little concern to the level of catastrophe. Jane frets about having to grow up in a man’s world as a female author threatened with the prospect of hoeing a garden for potatoes. Odysseus was looking forward to getting home and working on his lands but he had giant sea creatures in the way.
Perhaps I can’t blame Jane Austin too much for according to this movie anyway, she was raised in a society built entirely on inheritance. Her mother wants her to marry some guy for inheritance. Her “sister” (I think distant French relative even though they kept referring to her as sister) escaped the French Revolution but brought her dead husband’s money with her and marries Jane’s brother. Neither work after the marriage. Jane’s true love lives on the money doled to him by his uncle and even his brothers and sisters in America live off that money as he sends it to them. It is mentioned multiple times in the movie that those who don’t marry for money end up poor and various examples of relatives are given. Out of curiosity, who the hell in this country actually worked for money? Something doesn’t seem right.
“She is the first to be aware of the Terror which rules our moral situation” I agree that is how she portrays our moral situation, but that is just dumb. No further comments needed.
“the purity of our secular spirituality, whose dark and dubious places are more numerous and obscure than those of religious spirituality” Sounds like somebody is an atheist. I agree that religious spirituality does not have many dark and dubious places and is not that obscure, but… WHAT?! Only a sissy could dwell on this crap!!! Who cares? Good vs Evil, that is a story! Not ambiguous vs. ambiguous, that is boring and leans towards evil since it degrades the moral importance that Good vs Evil epochs teach.
Jane Austin may be the grandmother of the Soap Opera, shows that dwell to a near vicious level on relationships and their importance. Am I saying that relationships have no place in story? No! But manly movies never make a character more important than his environment. Take Shawshank Redemption, a story all about a man falsely accused. The movie doesn’t dwell as much on the tortured soul of the falsely accused and how his wife cheated on him. Instead it shows how he got over it and righted a great injustice going on in the prison. The Jane Austin version would have dwelled on what a great friend in prison he made. All action movies involve the hero making the world a better place, and don’t focus on how he made himself a slightly better person. That is always the smaller side story. Hamlet, one of the manliest stories of all time (some would misunderstand as a chick flick simply because it dives into character), spends his life trying to find out how he can avenge his father’s death. There is something greater than himself. In Becoming Jane, there is nothing greater than Jane’s happiness. She is not a heroine; she is a leaf on the wind complaining about how the wind isn’t fair to her.
Oh and one last thing, the commercials prior to this movie were a dead giveaway for the dim-bulb nature of the audience. All of them were hippy movies that no doubt will barely make their budgets back. Among the most memorable was the story of some mexican kid who adventures to America to see his mother working in LA, and the plot revolves around illegal immigration and how no law can break the bond of mother and son. Make me puke.
Big whoop. Go see Hot Rod, you’ll pee yourself laughing. That movie has good lines in it like “I’d rather die than live in a world where I can’t kick your ass”.
PS.
Question: Why would I go watch this movie?
Answer:
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
The Summer Blockbuster Final Tally.
Now that this mad, mad, mad, mad summer of big movies is finally winding down, we can take a step back to analyze, objectively, which one was the best. Noticing a void and filling it in his best manner, Dave put together a Reviewinator program in Visual Basic that provides a method of rating movies, taking into account that different movies are good for different reasons. The Reviewinator allows you to define categories for a movie, and weight them according to what is most important. For instance, "ability to make you cry," "touchy-feely-ness," and "David Duchovny's suaveness" might be important categories for Return to Me but not for Commando. The Reviewinator then takes a weighted average to determine the objective score for a movie. Note that a category can have a negative weighting, which indicates that it's important that a movie does not have that quality (for instance, "touchy-feely-ness" in Commando), but in all cases, higher category values are better (for instance, a category weighted -5, with a value of 10 indicates that it's important the movie not contain any of that, and it didn't).
So without further adieu, I present the final, objective, and completely inarguable scores for the summer's top blockbusters.
Review for Spider-Man 3
Overall rating: 8.56
Content summary:
Web-slinging action (weight 5): 9
Intense, character-driven story (weight 5): 10
Evil, freak-show villains (weight 5): 10
Ability to stay on a single plot line for more than 30 seconds (weight 3): 3
Review for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
Overall rating: 8.24
Content summary:
Pirates (weight 5): 10
Ninja (weight -5): 10
Swords (weight 5): 10
Boats (weight 5): 10
Coherent Plot (weight 1): 6
Scene in which it is revealed that after 10 years, if the Dutchman's Captain's love remains true to him, he is released from his service and a new captain is found, otherwise, he is bound for an eternity, which explains that Calypso's betrayal of Davey Jones doomed him to an eternity as captain of the Dutchman, and gives the movie a satisfying ending, wherein Elizabeth, by being true to Will, gets him back after 10 years (weight 4): 0
Review for Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
Overall rating: 7.50
Content summary:
Superheroes (weight 5): 8
Supervillains (weight 5): 7
Action (weight 5): 7
Extreme lameness, like the first one (weight -5): 8
Review for Ocean's 13
Overall rating: 8.22
Content summary:
General Confusion about what's going on (weight 4): 8
George Clooney's suaveness (weight 3): 10
Brad Pitt's ability to make any woman swoon (weight 3): 6
Matt Damon's boyish good looks (weight 3): 8
Al Pacino's eeeeevilness (weight 3): 10
Julia Roberts' mouth the size of New Hampshire (weight -1): 10
Witty Repartee (weight 5): 7
Vegas, baby (weight 1): 10
Review for Transformers
Overall rating: 9.00
Content summary:
Awesomeness (weight 5): 10
Extreme Explosions (weight 5): 9
Crap-your-pants Action (weight 5): 10
One-liners (weight 3): 7
Ability to be appreciated by anyone outside of the 18-35 male demographic (weight 1): 5
Review for Ratatouille
Overall rating: 9.47
Content summary:
Animation (weight 5): 10
Humor (weight 5): 9
Sweetness (weight 4): 10
Pixar's Magic (weight 5): 9
Review for Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix, in IMAX 3D
Overall rating: 10.00
Content summary:
Witchcraft (weight 5): 10
Wizardry (weight 5): 10
Story (weight 5): 10
Shootout in the Ministry of Magic, in 3D (weight 5): 12
Quidditch (weight 1): 0
Review for The Simpsons Movie
Overall rating: 7.95
Content summary:
D'oh! (weight 5): 10
Why you little! (weight 5): 10
Aye Carumba! (weight 3): 8
*sneers* Excellent (weight 3): 7
Humor (weight 5): 8
Bart's penis, which I really just did not need to see (weight -1): -10
And there you have it, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix easily walks away as the best movie of the summer. Remember, if you disagree you are not just wrong, you are educated stupid and evil.
Also, I haven't yet seen Live Free or Die Hard or The Bourne Ultimatum so if you have, please feel free to send me a pithy and arbitrary review.
-----EDIT-----
Finally saw Bourne Ultimatum and Die Hard 4 so here are the indisputable reviews.
Review for Bourne Ultimatum
Overall rating: 8.39
Content summary:
Suspense (weight 5): 10
Action (weight 5): 10
Suspenseful foot chases (weight 4): 10
Action-ful car chases (weight 5): 10
Matt Damon's boyish good looks (weight 3): 10
Hot chick, saved by Matt Damon's boyish good looks (weight 4): 10
OMFG WOULD YOU HOLD THAT GORRAM CAMERA STILL FOR JUST ONE FRAKKING SECOND! (weight 5): 0
Hehe. I used swear words from both Serenity AND BS Galactica in that previous category (weight 0): 10
Review for Live Free or Die Hard
Overall rating: 7.76
Content summary:
Compelling villain, portrayed by either Alan Rickman or Jeremy Irons (weight 4): 0
Explosions (weight 5): 10
"I'm a Mac" guy (weight -1): -5
More explosions (weight 4): 10
Bruce Willis progressively getting the crap kicked out of him (weight 5): 10
Even more explosions (weight 3): 10
Improbable means of killing bad guys (weight 3): 5
Destroying a helicopter by jumping a car into it (weight 4): 10
Hot asian ninja chick (weight 3): 10
Hot asian ninja chick getting her butt kicked by a non-ninja punch to the face (weight 3): 10
Plot where, in the end, it does in fact end up being a bank robbery (weight 1): 7
Beethoven's Ninth (weight 1): 0
Now that this mad, mad, mad, mad summer of big movies is finally winding down, we can take a step back to analyze, objectively, which one was the best. Noticing a void and filling it in his best manner, Dave put together a Reviewinator program in Visual Basic that provides a method of rating movies, taking into account that different movies are good for different reasons. The Reviewinator allows you to define categories for a movie, and weight them according to what is most important. For instance, "ability to make you cry," "touchy-feely-ness," and "David Duchovny's suaveness" might be important categories for Return to Me but not for Commando. The Reviewinator then takes a weighted average to determine the objective score for a movie. Note that a category can have a negative weighting, which indicates that it's important that a movie does not have that quality (for instance, "touchy-feely-ness" in Commando), but in all cases, higher category values are better (for instance, a category weighted -5, with a value of 10 indicates that it's important the movie not contain any of that, and it didn't).
So without further adieu, I present the final, objective, and completely inarguable scores for the summer's top blockbusters.
Review for Spider-Man 3
Overall rating: 8.56
Content summary:
Web-slinging action (weight 5): 9
Intense, character-driven story (weight 5): 10
Evil, freak-show villains (weight 5): 10
Ability to stay on a single plot line for more than 30 seconds (weight 3): 3
Review for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
Overall rating: 8.24
Content summary:
Pirates (weight 5): 10
Ninja (weight -5): 10
Swords (weight 5): 10
Boats (weight 5): 10
Coherent Plot (weight 1): 6
Scene in which it is revealed that after 10 years, if the Dutchman's Captain's love remains true to him, he is released from his service and a new captain is found, otherwise, he is bound for an eternity, which explains that Calypso's betrayal of Davey Jones doomed him to an eternity as captain of the Dutchman, and gives the movie a satisfying ending, wherein Elizabeth, by being true to Will, gets him back after 10 years (weight 4): 0
Review for Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
Overall rating: 7.50
Content summary:
Superheroes (weight 5): 8
Supervillains (weight 5): 7
Action (weight 5): 7
Extreme lameness, like the first one (weight -5): 8
Review for Ocean's 13
Overall rating: 8.22
Content summary:
General Confusion about what's going on (weight 4): 8
George Clooney's suaveness (weight 3): 10
Brad Pitt's ability to make any woman swoon (weight 3): 6
Matt Damon's boyish good looks (weight 3): 8
Al Pacino's eeeeevilness (weight 3): 10
Julia Roberts' mouth the size of New Hampshire (weight -1): 10
Witty Repartee (weight 5): 7
Vegas, baby (weight 1): 10
Review for Transformers
Overall rating: 9.00
Content summary:
Awesomeness (weight 5): 10
Extreme Explosions (weight 5): 9
Crap-your-pants Action (weight 5): 10
One-liners (weight 3): 7
Ability to be appreciated by anyone outside of the 18-35 male demographic (weight 1): 5
Review for Ratatouille
Overall rating: 9.47
Content summary:
Animation (weight 5): 10
Humor (weight 5): 9
Sweetness (weight 4): 10
Pixar's Magic (weight 5): 9
Review for Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix, in IMAX 3D
Overall rating: 10.00
Content summary:
Witchcraft (weight 5): 10
Wizardry (weight 5): 10
Story (weight 5): 10
Shootout in the Ministry of Magic, in 3D (weight 5): 12
Quidditch (weight 1): 0
Review for The Simpsons Movie
Overall rating: 7.95
Content summary:
D'oh! (weight 5): 10
Why you little! (weight 5): 10
Aye Carumba! (weight 3): 8
*sneers* Excellent (weight 3): 7
Humor (weight 5): 8
Bart's penis, which I really just did not need to see (weight -1): -10
And there you have it, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix easily walks away as the best movie of the summer. Remember, if you disagree you are not just wrong, you are educated stupid and evil.
Also, I haven't yet seen Live Free or Die Hard or The Bourne Ultimatum so if you have, please feel free to send me a pithy and arbitrary review.
-----EDIT-----
Finally saw Bourne Ultimatum and Die Hard 4 so here are the indisputable reviews.
Review for Bourne Ultimatum
Overall rating: 8.39
Content summary:
Suspense (weight 5): 10
Action (weight 5): 10
Suspenseful foot chases (weight 4): 10
Action-ful car chases (weight 5): 10
Matt Damon's boyish good looks (weight 3): 10
Hot chick, saved by Matt Damon's boyish good looks (weight 4): 10
OMFG WOULD YOU HOLD THAT GORRAM CAMERA STILL FOR JUST ONE FRAKKING SECOND! (weight 5): 0
Hehe. I used swear words from both Serenity AND BS Galactica in that previous category (weight 0): 10
Review for Live Free or Die Hard
Overall rating: 7.76
Content summary:
Compelling villain, portrayed by either Alan Rickman or Jeremy Irons (weight 4): 0
Explosions (weight 5): 10
"I'm a Mac" guy (weight -1): -5
More explosions (weight 4): 10
Bruce Willis progressively getting the crap kicked out of him (weight 5): 10
Even more explosions (weight 3): 10
Improbable means of killing bad guys (weight 3): 5
Destroying a helicopter by jumping a car into it (weight 4): 10
Hot asian ninja chick (weight 3): 10
Hot asian ninja chick getting her butt kicked by a non-ninja punch to the face (weight 3): 10
Plot where, in the end, it does in fact end up being a bank robbery (weight 1): 7
Beethoven's Ninth (weight 1): 0
Monday, August 6, 2007
BlizzCon 2007.
Check out the pictures at my Google Photos page. ComicCon photos to follow soon.
I'm not doing a big write up this time. Just a few thoughts.
New expansion pack, Wrath of the Lich King announced for WoW. Played a short demo at The Con. No, the Death Knight was not playable.
Didn't get to play StarCraft II, like I wanted.
They had a panel on the WarCraft movie, with Blizzard and Legendary Pictures (Batman Begins, 300). It sounds good. Legendary doesn't want to make a video game movie; they want to make an epic (think Gladiator or Braveheart) movie that uses the WarCraft lore. (You can read the entire backstory to WarCraft here. It really is interesting.) The producer indicated that they were likely to spend at least $100m on it.
We also watched the StarCraft, WarCraft III, and World of Warcraft 5v5 arena finals. First two were so-so, but the WoW arena finals were very exciting. They were commentated by Ben "Leeroy Jenkins" Schulz, who was actually a very good commentator. He knew the strategies and tactics of 5v5 arena fights and knew what to look for and what to point out to the audience.
Check out the pictures at my Google Photos page. ComicCon photos to follow soon.
I'm not doing a big write up this time. Just a few thoughts.
New expansion pack, Wrath of the Lich King announced for WoW. Played a short demo at The Con. No, the Death Knight was not playable.
Didn't get to play StarCraft II, like I wanted.
They had a panel on the WarCraft movie, with Blizzard and Legendary Pictures (Batman Begins, 300). It sounds good. Legendary doesn't want to make a video game movie; they want to make an epic (think Gladiator or Braveheart) movie that uses the WarCraft lore. (You can read the entire backstory to WarCraft here. It really is interesting.) The producer indicated that they were likely to spend at least $100m on it.
We also watched the StarCraft, WarCraft III, and World of Warcraft 5v5 arena finals. First two were so-so, but the WoW arena finals were very exciting. They were commentated by Ben "Leeroy Jenkins" Schulz, who was actually a very good commentator. He knew the strategies and tactics of 5v5 arena fights and knew what to look for and what to point out to the audience.
Friday, August 3, 2007
Why you pretend to like modern art
republished from Asia Times Online
By Spengler
After I wrote Admit it - you really hate modern art (January 30), many readers assured me that I was quite mistaken about them. Especially among the educated elites there are many who will go to their graves proclaiming their love for modern art, and I owe them an explanation of sorts. At the cost of most of few remaining friends, I will provide it.
You pretend to like modern art because you want to be creative. In fact, you are not creative, not in the least. In all of human history we know of only a few hundred truly creative men and women. It saddens me to break the news, but you aren't one of them. By insisting that you are not creative, you think I am saying that you are not important. I do not mean that, but will have to return to the topic later.
You have your heart set on being creative because you want to worship yourself, your children, or some pretentious impostor, rather than the god of the Bible. Absence of faith has not made you more rational. On the contrary, it has made you ridiculous in your adoration of clownish little deities, of whom the silliest is yourself. G K Chesterton said that if you stop believing in God, you will believe in anything.
For quite some time, conservative critics have attacked the conceit that every nursery-school child should be expected to be creative. Professor Allan Bloom observed 20 years ago in The Closing of the American Mind that creativity until quite recently referred to an attribute of God, not of humans. To demand the attribute of creativity for every human being is the same as saying that everyone should be a little god.
But what should we mean by creativity? In science and mathematics, it should refer to discoveries that truly are singular, that is, could not possibly be derived from any preceding knowledge.
We might ask: In the whole history of the arts and sciences, how many contributors truly are indispensable, such that history could not have been the same without their contribution? There is room for argument, but it is hard to come up with more than a few dozen names. Europe had not progressed much beyond Archimedes of Syracuse in mathematics until Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz invented the calculus. Until Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler, Europe relied on the 1st-century work of Ptolemy. After Kepler only Newton, and after Newton only Albert Einstein fundamentally changed our views on planetary motion. Scholars still argue over whether someone else would have discovered Special Relativity if Einstein had not, but seem to agree that General Relativity had no clear precedent.
How many composers, for that matter, created Western classical music? If only a dozen names are known to future generations, they still will know what is fundamental to this art form. [1]
We can argue about the origin of scientific or artistic genius, but we must agree that it is extremely rare. Of the hundreds of composers employed as court or ecclesiastical musicians during Johann Sebastian Bach's lifetime, we hear the work of only a handful today. Eighteenth-century musicians did not strive for genius, but for solid craftsmanship; how it came to be that a Bach would emerge from this milieu has no consensus explanation. As for the rest, we can say with certainty that if a Georg Phillip Telemann (a more successful contemporary of Bach) had not lived, someone else could have done his job without great loss to the art form.
If we use the term "creative" to mean more or less the same thing as "irreplaceable", then the number of truly creative individuals appears very small indeed. It is very unlikely that you are one of them. If you work hard at your discipline, you are very fortunate to be able to follow what the best people in the field are doing, and if you are extremely good, you might have the privilege of elaborating on points made by greater minds. Beneficial as such efforts might be, it is very unlikely that if you did not do this, no one else would have done it. On the contrary, if you are at the cutting edge of research in any field, you take every possible measure to publish your work as soon as possible, so that you may get credit for it before someone else comes up with precisely the same thing. Even the very best minds in a field live in terror that they will be made dispensable by others who circulate their conclusions first.
Bach inscribed each of his works with the motto, "Glory belongs only to God," and insisted (wrongly) that anyone who worked as hard as he did could have achieved results just as good. He was content to be a diligent craftsman in the service of God, and did not seek to be a genius; he simply was one. That is the starting point of the man of faith. One does not set out to be a genius, but rather to be of service; extraordinary gifts are responsibility to be borne with humility. The search for genius began when the service of God no
longer interested the artists and scientists.
Friedrich Nietzsche announced the death of God, and the arrival of the artist as hero, taking as his model Richard Wagner, about whose artistic merits we can argue on a different equation. Whether Wagner was a genius is debatable, but it is beyond doubt that the devotees of Nietzsche were no Wagners, let alone Bachs. To be free of convention was to create one's own artistic world, in Nietzsche's vision, but very few artists are capable of creating their own artistic world. That puts everyone else in an unpleasant position.
To accommodate the ambitions of the artists, the 20th century turned the invention of artistic worlds into a mass-manufacturing business. In place of the humble craftsmanship of Bach's world, the artistic world split into movements. To be taken seriously during the 20th century, artists had to invent their own style and their own language. Critics heaped contempt on artists who simply reproduced the sort of products that had characterized the past, and praised the founders of schools: Impressionism, Cubism, Primitivism, Abstract Expressionism, and so forth.
Without drawing on the patronage of the wealthy, modern art could not have succeeded; each day we read of new record prices for 20th-century paintings, for example the estimated US$140 million paid to media mogul David Geffen for a Jackson Pollock. Very rich people like to flatter themselves that they are geniuses, and that their skill or luck at marketing music or computer code qualifies them as arbiters of taste. Successful business people typically are extremely clever, but they tend to be idiot savants, with sharp insight into some detail of industry that produces great wealth, but no concept whatever of issues outside their immediate field of expertise. Because the world conspires to flatter the wealthy, rich people are more prone to think of themselves as little gods than ordinary people, and far more susceptible to the cult of creativity in art.
In his great novel Doktor Faustus, Thomas Mann portrayed this as the work of the devil. The new Faust who makes a pact with Satan in this novel represents the composer Arnold Schoenberg, who sells his soul in return for a system for composing music.
A new class of critics served as midwives at the birth of these monsters. I marveled in the essay noted above over the fact that museum-goers gush over Pollock's random dribbles, but never would listen to Arnold Schoenberg's 12-tone compositions at a concert hall. The conductor Sir Thomas Beecham famously said that people don't like music; they only like the way it sounds. In the case of Pollock, people neither like his work nor the way it looks; what they like is the idea that the artist in his arrogance can redefine the world on
his own terms.
To be an important person in this perverse scheme means to shake one's fist at God and define one's own little world, however dull, tawdry and pathetic it might be. To lack creativity is to despair. Hence the attraction of the myriad ideological movements in art that gives the despairing artists the illusion of creativity. If God is the Creator, then imitation of God is emulation of creation. But that is not quite true, for the Judeo-Christian god is more than a creator; God is a creator who loves his creatures.
In the world of faith there is quite a different way to be indispensable, and that is through acts of kindness and service. A mother is indispensable to her child, as are husbands, wives and friends to each other. If one dispenses with the ambition to remake the world according one's whim, and accepts rather that the world is God's creation, then imitatio Dei consists of acts of love.
In their urge toward self-worship, the artists of the 20th century descended to extreme levels of artlessness to persuade themselves that they were in fact creative. In their compulsion to worship themselves in the absence of God, they produced ideas far more ridiculous, and certainly a great deal uglier, than revealed religion in all its weaknesses ever contrived. The modern cult of individual self-expression is a poor substitute for the religion it strove to replace, and the delusion of personal creativity an even worse
substitute for redemption.
Note
1. Josquin des Prez, Claudio Monteverdi, Bach, Domenico Scarlatti, George Frideric Haendel, Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Frederic Chopin, Johannes Brahms.
republished from Asia Times Online
By Spengler
After I wrote Admit it - you really hate modern art (January 30), many readers assured me that I was quite mistaken about them. Especially among the educated elites there are many who will go to their graves proclaiming their love for modern art, and I owe them an explanation of sorts. At the cost of most of few remaining friends, I will provide it.
You pretend to like modern art because you want to be creative. In fact, you are not creative, not in the least. In all of human history we know of only a few hundred truly creative men and women. It saddens me to break the news, but you aren't one of them. By insisting that you are not creative, you think I am saying that you are not important. I do not mean that, but will have to return to the topic later.
You have your heart set on being creative because you want to worship yourself, your children, or some pretentious impostor, rather than the god of the Bible. Absence of faith has not made you more rational. On the contrary, it has made you ridiculous in your adoration of clownish little deities, of whom the silliest is yourself. G K Chesterton said that if you stop believing in God, you will believe in anything.
For quite some time, conservative critics have attacked the conceit that every nursery-school child should be expected to be creative. Professor Allan Bloom observed 20 years ago in The Closing of the American Mind that creativity until quite recently referred to an attribute of God, not of humans. To demand the attribute of creativity for every human being is the same as saying that everyone should be a little god.
But what should we mean by creativity? In science and mathematics, it should refer to discoveries that truly are singular, that is, could not possibly be derived from any preceding knowledge.
We might ask: In the whole history of the arts and sciences, how many contributors truly are indispensable, such that history could not have been the same without their contribution? There is room for argument, but it is hard to come up with more than a few dozen names. Europe had not progressed much beyond Archimedes of Syracuse in mathematics until Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz invented the calculus. Until Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler, Europe relied on the 1st-century work of Ptolemy. After Kepler only Newton, and after Newton only Albert Einstein fundamentally changed our views on planetary motion. Scholars still argue over whether someone else would have discovered Special Relativity if Einstein had not, but seem to agree that General Relativity had no clear precedent.
How many composers, for that matter, created Western classical music? If only a dozen names are known to future generations, they still will know what is fundamental to this art form. [1]
We can argue about the origin of scientific or artistic genius, but we must agree that it is extremely rare. Of the hundreds of composers employed as court or ecclesiastical musicians during Johann Sebastian Bach's lifetime, we hear the work of only a handful today. Eighteenth-century musicians did not strive for genius, but for solid craftsmanship; how it came to be that a Bach would emerge from this milieu has no consensus explanation. As for the rest, we can say with certainty that if a Georg Phillip Telemann (a more successful contemporary of Bach) had not lived, someone else could have done his job without great loss to the art form.
If we use the term "creative" to mean more or less the same thing as "irreplaceable", then the number of truly creative individuals appears very small indeed. It is very unlikely that you are one of them. If you work hard at your discipline, you are very fortunate to be able to follow what the best people in the field are doing, and if you are extremely good, you might have the privilege of elaborating on points made by greater minds. Beneficial as such efforts might be, it is very unlikely that if you did not do this, no one else would have done it. On the contrary, if you are at the cutting edge of research in any field, you take every possible measure to publish your work as soon as possible, so that you may get credit for it before someone else comes up with precisely the same thing. Even the very best minds in a field live in terror that they will be made dispensable by others who circulate their conclusions first.
Bach inscribed each of his works with the motto, "Glory belongs only to God," and insisted (wrongly) that anyone who worked as hard as he did could have achieved results just as good. He was content to be a diligent craftsman in the service of God, and did not seek to be a genius; he simply was one. That is the starting point of the man of faith. One does not set out to be a genius, but rather to be of service; extraordinary gifts are responsibility to be borne with humility. The search for genius began when the service of God no
longer interested the artists and scientists.
Friedrich Nietzsche announced the death of God, and the arrival of the artist as hero, taking as his model Richard Wagner, about whose artistic merits we can argue on a different equation. Whether Wagner was a genius is debatable, but it is beyond doubt that the devotees of Nietzsche were no Wagners, let alone Bachs. To be free of convention was to create one's own artistic world, in Nietzsche's vision, but very few artists are capable of creating their own artistic world. That puts everyone else in an unpleasant position.
To accommodate the ambitions of the artists, the 20th century turned the invention of artistic worlds into a mass-manufacturing business. In place of the humble craftsmanship of Bach's world, the artistic world split into movements. To be taken seriously during the 20th century, artists had to invent their own style and their own language. Critics heaped contempt on artists who simply reproduced the sort of products that had characterized the past, and praised the founders of schools: Impressionism, Cubism, Primitivism, Abstract Expressionism, and so forth.
Without drawing on the patronage of the wealthy, modern art could not have succeeded; each day we read of new record prices for 20th-century paintings, for example the estimated US$140 million paid to media mogul David Geffen for a Jackson Pollock. Very rich people like to flatter themselves that they are geniuses, and that their skill or luck at marketing music or computer code qualifies them as arbiters of taste. Successful business people typically are extremely clever, but they tend to be idiot savants, with sharp insight into some detail of industry that produces great wealth, but no concept whatever of issues outside their immediate field of expertise. Because the world conspires to flatter the wealthy, rich people are more prone to think of themselves as little gods than ordinary people, and far more susceptible to the cult of creativity in art.
In his great novel Doktor Faustus, Thomas Mann portrayed this as the work of the devil. The new Faust who makes a pact with Satan in this novel represents the composer Arnold Schoenberg, who sells his soul in return for a system for composing music.
A new class of critics served as midwives at the birth of these monsters. I marveled in the essay noted above over the fact that museum-goers gush over Pollock's random dribbles, but never would listen to Arnold Schoenberg's 12-tone compositions at a concert hall. The conductor Sir Thomas Beecham famously said that people don't like music; they only like the way it sounds. In the case of Pollock, people neither like his work nor the way it looks; what they like is the idea that the artist in his arrogance can redefine the world on
his own terms.
To be an important person in this perverse scheme means to shake one's fist at God and define one's own little world, however dull, tawdry and pathetic it might be. To lack creativity is to despair. Hence the attraction of the myriad ideological movements in art that gives the despairing artists the illusion of creativity. If God is the Creator, then imitation of God is emulation of creation. But that is not quite true, for the Judeo-Christian god is more than a creator; God is a creator who loves his creatures.
In the world of faith there is quite a different way to be indispensable, and that is through acts of kindness and service. A mother is indispensable to her child, as are husbands, wives and friends to each other. If one dispenses with the ambition to remake the world according one's whim, and accepts rather that the world is God's creation, then imitatio Dei consists of acts of love.
In their urge toward self-worship, the artists of the 20th century descended to extreme levels of artlessness to persuade themselves that they were in fact creative. In their compulsion to worship themselves in the absence of God, they produced ideas far more ridiculous, and certainly a great deal uglier, than revealed religion in all its weaknesses ever contrived. The modern cult of individual self-expression is a poor substitute for the religion it strove to replace, and the delusion of personal creativity an even worse
substitute for redemption.
Note
1. Josquin des Prez, Claudio Monteverdi, Bach, Domenico Scarlatti, George Frideric Haendel, Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Frederic Chopin, Johannes Brahms.
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